ON 

ACTORS 



AND 



THE ART OF ACTING 



Works by the same Author. 

LIFE and WORKS of GOETHE. New Edition. 

The STORY of GOETHE'S LIFE. 

The HISTORY of PHILOSOPHY from THALES to 
COMTE. 2 vols. Fourth Edition. 

ARISTOTLE : a Chapter from the History of Science ; 
including Analyses of Aristotle's Scientific Writings. 

The PHYSIOLOGY of COMMON LIFE. 2 vols. 

STUDIES in ANIMAL LIFE. 

Recently published. 
PROBLEMS of LIFE and MIND. First Series. ' 
The FOUNDATION of a CREED. 2 vols. 



ON 



ACTORS 



AND 



THE ART OF ACTING 



BY 



/ 



GEORGE HENRY LEWES 




LONDON 

SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 

1875 



[All rights reserved] 



~v w 



/ s~> 



/' 



EPISTLE TO ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 



My dear Trollope, 

One reason for inscribing this trifle to 
you is that years ago you expressed a wish to see 
some dramatic criticisms which had interested you 
republished in a more accessible form than the 
pages of a periodical. The reasons which have 
always deterred me from republishing articles 
written for a temporary purpose have not lost their 
force ; and if I here weave together several detached 
papers into a small volume, it is because a tempo- 
rary purpose may again be served now a change 
seems coming over the state of the stage, and 
there are signs of a revival of the once-splendid 
art of the actor. To effect this revival there 
must be not only accomplished artists and an 



vi EPISTLE TO ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 

eager public ; there must be a more enlightened 
public. The critical pit, filled with playgoers who 
were familiar with fine acting and had trained 
judgments, has disappeared. In its place there 
is a mass of amusement-seekers, not without a 
nucleus of intelligent spectators, but of this nucleus 
only a small minority has very accurate ideas of 
what constitutes good art. 

The performances of Salvini this summer, while 
reawakening my slumbering interest in the stage, 
recalling the fine raptures of bygone years, have 
also, by the discussions to which they have led, 
made me sensible of the chaotic state of opinion 
on the subject of acting in many minds of rare 
intelligence. I have heard those for whose opi- 
nions in other directions my respect is great 
utter judgments on this subject which proved that 
they had not even a suspicion of what the Art 
of Acting really is. Whether they blamed or 
praised, the grounds which they advanced for 
praise and blame were often questionable. Every 



EPISTLE TO ANTHONY TROLLOPE. vii 

reader will admit that, without knowing anything 
of the Art of Painting, each visitor at the Exhibi- 
tion is at perfect liberty to express his admiration 
or dislike of any picture, so long as he confines 
himself to the expression of a personal feeling, 
and says, 'This pleases — this displeases me.' But 
it is preposterous (though exceedingly common) for 
one who has never qualified himself by a study of 
the conditions and demands of the Art to formu- 
late his personal feeling in a critical judgment, and 
say, ' This is a fine picture ; this painter is quite 
second-rate.' Equally preposterous may be the 
estimate of an actor on the part of those who 
have not studied the Art. 

It is noticeable that people generally over- 
rate a fine actor's genius, and underrate his 
trained skill. They are apt to credit him with a 
power of intellectual conception and poetic crea- 
tion to which he has really a very slight claim, 
and fail to recognise all the difficulties which his 
artistic training has enabled him to master. The 



viii EPISTLE TO ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 

ordinary spectator is moved, but is incapable of 
discriminating the sources of his emotion : he iden- 
tifies the actor with the character, and assigns to 
the actor's genius the effect mainly due to the dra- 
matist. Nor is this illusion dispelled when, on some 
other occasion, this same actor leaves him quite 
unmoved by a representation of similar passions 
not rendered aesthetically truthful by the dramatist. 
Thousands have been moved by performers in 
Hamlet, whose acting in other characters has 
excited indifference or contempt. The fact that 
no actor has been known utterly to fail in Hamlet, 
while failures in Shylock and Othello are nume- 
rous, is very instructive. I remember when the 
German company played ' Faust ' at the St. 
James's Theatre, the sudden illness of the tra- 
gedian who was to have played Mephistopheles 
caused the part to be handed over to a fourth-rate 
member of the troupe who knew the part ; yet 
although the performance was a very poor ex- 
ample of the Art, the interest excited by the 






EPISTLE TO ANTHONY TROLLOPE. ix 

character was so great that the public and the 
critics were delighted. It is the incalculable ad- 
vantage of the actor that he stands in the suf- 
fused light of emotion kindled by the author. He 
speaks the great thoughts of an impassioned mind, 
and is rewarded, as the bearer of glad tidings is 
rewarded though he have had nothing to do with 
the facts which he narrates. 

Another general misconception is that there is 
no special physique nor any special training ne- 
cessary to make an actor. Almost every young 
person imagines he could act, if he tried. There 
is a story of some one who, on being asked if he 
could play the violin, answered, ' I don't know ; 
I never tried.' This is the ordinary view of acting. 
The answer should have been, ' No, I cannot play 
because I never tried.' Violin-playing and acting 
do not come by nature. Nor is it any argument 
that Private Theatricals (a very pleasant amuse- 
ment — for the performers) often reveals a certain 
amount of histrionic aptitude in people who have 



x EPISTLE TO ANTHONY TROLLOP E. 

never been trained. In the first place, the amateur 
is always a copy of some actors he has seen. In 
the next place, amateur acting bears the same 
relation to the art of the stage as drawing-room 
singing bears to the opera. We often listen 
with pleasure to a singer in private whom we 
should mercilessly hiss from the concert-room or 
stage. 

The non-recognition of the difficulties of the 
Art arises from a non-recognition of the conditions 
under which the artist produces his effects. We 
must know what are the demands and limitations 
of scenic presentation before we can decide whether 
the actor has shown skill. Ignorance of these 
sustains the current confusions respecting natural 
acting. Ignorance of these assigns excellences or 
deficiencies to the actor's mind, when in reality 
they depend solely on his means of physical ex- 
pression. If there is no pathos in the tones, the 
actor's soul may be a sob, yet we shall remain 
unmoved. The poet, who felt that pathos when 



EPISTLE TO ANTHONY TROLLOPE. xi 

he wrote, would probably be ridiculous were he in 
the actor's place, and tried to give expression to 
the feeling. 

But I must not be seduced into a dissertation. 
I only wanted to indicate that the object of here 
reprinting remarks, made at various times and in 
various periodicals, is to call upon the reflective 
part of the public to make some attempt at dis- 
criminating the sources of theatrical emotion. I 
want to direct attention not simply to the fact that 
Acting is an Art, but that, like all other Arts, it is 
obstructed by a mass of unsystematised opinion, 
calling itself criticism. 

You will understand how there must necessarily 
be repetitions, in articles written on the same sub- 
ject at widely different periods ; and how the 
treatment of each subject can never pretend to be 
exhaustive in periodical papers. Let me, in con- 
clusion, add that they were written during a period 
of dramatic degradation. The poetic drama had 
vanished with Macready and Helen Faucit, and 



xii EPISTLE TO ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 

its day seemed, to many, a day which would never 
recur. With ' Hamlet ' and ' Othello ' drawing 
enthusiastic crowds during a long season, and with 
a play by Tennyson promised for the next, the 
day, let us hope, has once more dawned ! 

Ever yours affectionately, 

G. H. LEWES. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Edmund Kean . . . . . i 

II. Charles Kean . . . . 12 

III. Rachel . . . . . .23 

IV. Macready . . . . . . 32 

V. Farren . . . . . .51 

VI. Charles Mathews . . . . 59 

VII. Frederic Lemaitre . . . -73 

VIII. The two Keeleys . . . . . 80 

IX. Shakspeare as Actor and Critic . . 88 



CONTENTS. 



X. On Natural Acting . . . 109 

XL Foreign Actors on our Stage . .126 

XII. The Drama in Paris. 1865 . . . 178 

XIII. The Drama in Germany. 1867 . .213 

XIV. The Drama in Spain. 1867 . . . 235 
XV. First Impressions of Salvini. 1875 . 264 



to 



ON ACTORS 

AND 

THE ART OF ACTING. 

CHAPTER I. 

EDMUND KEAN. 

The greatest artist is he who is greatest in the highest 
reaches of his art, even although he may lack the 
qualities necessary for the adequate execution of some 
minor details. It is not by his faults, but by his excel- 
lences, that we measure a great man. The strength of a 
beam is measured by its weakest part, of a man by his 
strongest. Thus estimated, Edmund Kean was incom- 
parably the greatest actor I have seen, although even 
warm admirers must admit that he had many and serious 
defects. His was not a flexible genius. He was a very 
imperfect mime — or more correctly speaking, his miming 
power, though admirable within a certain range, was sin- 



2 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



gularly limited in its range. He was tricky and flashy in 
style. But he was an actor of such splendid endow- 
ments in the highest departments of the art, that no one 
in our day can be named of equal rank, unless it be 
Rachel, who was as a woman what he was as a man. 
The irregular splendour of his power was felicitously cha- 
racterised in the saying of Coleridge, that ' seeing Kean 
act was reading Shakspeare by flashes of lightning,' 
so brilliant and so startling were the sudden illumi- 
nations, and so murky the dull intervals. Critics 'who 
had formed their ideal on the Kemble school were 
shocked at Kean's want of dignity, and at his fitful elo- 
cution, sometimes thrillingly effective, at other times 
deplorably tame and careless ; in their angry protests 
they went so far as to declare him c a mere mountebank.' 
Not so thought the pit 3 not so thought less biassed 
critics. He stirred the general heart with such a rush of 
mighty power, impressed himself so vividly by accent, 
look, and gesture, that it was as vain to protest against 
his defects as it was for French critics to insist upon 
Shakspeare's want of bienseance and bon goilt Could 
audiences have remained unmoved, they might have lent 
a willing ear to remonstrances, and laughed at or hissed 



EDMUND KEAN. 



some grave offences against taste and sense. But no 
audience could be unmoved ; all defects were over- 
looked or disregarded, because it was impossible to 
watch Kean as Othello, Shylock, Richard, or Sir Giles 
Overreach without being strangely shaken by the terror, 
and the pathos, and the passion of a stormy spirit 
littering itself in tones of irresistible power. His imita- 
tors have been mostly ridiculous, simply because they 
reproduced the manner and the mannerism, but could 
not reproduce the power which made these endurable. 
It is a fact little understood by imitators that the spots 
on the sun in nowise warm the world, and that a defi- 
ciency in light and heat cannot be replaced by a pro- 
digality of spots. 

Although I was a little boy when I first saw Kean, in 
1825, and but a youth when, in 1832, he quitted the 
stage for ever, yet so ineffaceable are the impressions his 
acting produced, that I feel far more at ease in speaking 
of his excellences and defects than I should feel in 
speaking of' many actors seen only a dozen years ago. 
It will be understood that I was in no condition then, to 
form an estimate of his qualities, and that I criticise from 
memory. Yet my memory of him is so vivid that I see 



4 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

his looks and gestures and hear his thrilling voice as if 
these were sensations of yesterday. Perhaps the defects 
which I now recognise would be more salient were I now 
to witness the performances. There is a softening, ideal- 
izing tendency in memory which may exaggerate the 
degree of excellence. Still these are only matters of de- 
gree ; and I think that my appreciation of the actor is 
on the whole little disturbed by such influences. At 
any rate I will try to set down fairly what a retrospect 
discloses. 

Kean's range of expression, as already hinted, was 
very limited. His physical aptitudes were such as con- 
fined him to the strictly tragic passions ; and for these he 
was magnificently endowed. Small and insignificant in 
figure, he could at times become impressively command- 
ing by the lion-like power and grace of his bearing. I 
remember, the last time I saw him play Othello, how 
puny he appeared beside Macready, until in the third act, 
when roused by Iago's taunts and insinuations, he moved 
towards him with a gouty hobble, seized him by the 
throat, and, in a well-known explosion, ' Villain ! be sure 
you prove/ &c, seemed to swell into a stature which 
made Macready appear small. On that very evening, 



EDMUND KEAN. 



when gout made it difficult for him to display his accus- 
tomed grace, when a drunken hoarseness had ruined the 
once matchless voice, such was the irresistible pathos — 
manly, not tearful — which vibrated in his tones and ex- 
pressed itself in look and gestures, that old men leaned 
their heads upon their arms and fairly sobbed. It was, 
one must confess, a patchy performance considered as 
a whole ; some parts were miserably tricky, others 
misconceived, others gabbled over in haste to reach the 
' points ' ; but it was irradiated with such flashes that I 
would again risk broken ribs for the chance of a good 
place in the pit to see anything like it. 

Even in earlier and better days there was much 
in his performance of Othello which was spasmodic, 
slovenly, false. The address to the Senate was very bad. 
He had little power of elocution unless when sustained 
by a strong emotion ; and this long simple narrative was 
the kind of speech he could not manage at all. He 
gabbled over it, impatient to arrive at the phrase ' And 
this is all the witchcraft I have used. Here comes the 
lady, let her witness it.' His delivery of this ' point ' 
always startled the audience into applause by its incisive 
tone and its abrupt transition; yet nothing could be 



ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



more out of keeping with the Shakspearian character. 
Othello might smile with lofty disdain at the accusation 
of witchcraft, or rebut it calmly, but not make it the 
climax of a withering sarcasm — attacking the word 
* witchcraft ' with high and sudden emphasis, and 
dropping into an almost disrespectful colloquialism as 
the lady appeared. Indeed, throughout the first and 
second acts, with the exception of occasional flashes (as 
in the passionate fervour with which he greets Desde- 
mona on landing at Cyprus), Kean's Othello was rather 
irritating and disappointing — arresting the mind but not 
satisfying it. From the third act onwards all was 
wrought out with a mastery over the resources of expres- 
sion such as has been seldom approached. In the succes- 
sive unfolding of these great scenes he represented with 
incomparable effect the lion-like fury, the deep and hag- 
gard pathos, the forlorn sense of desolation alternating 
with gusts of stormy cries for vengeance, the misgivings 
and sudden reassurances, the calm and deadly resolution 
of one not easily moved, but who, being moved, was 
stirred to the very depths. 

Kean was a consummate master of passionate expres- 
sion. People generally spoke of him as a type of the 



EDMUND KEAN. 



' impulsive actor.' But if by this they meant one who 
abandoned himself to the impulse of the moment without 
forethought of pre-arranged effect, nothing could be 
wider from the mark. He was an artist, and in Art all 
effects are regulated. The original suggestion may be, 
and generally is, sudden and unprepared — 'inspired,' as 
we say ; but the alert intellect recognises its truth, seizes 
on it, regulates it. Without nice calculation no propor- 
tion could be preserved ; we should have a work of fitful 
impulse, not a work of enduring Art. Kean vigilantly 
and patiently rehearsed every detail, trying the tones 
until his ear was satisfied, practising looks and gestures 
until his artistic sense was satisfied ; and having once 
regulated these he never changed them. The conse- 
quence was that, when he was sufficiently sober to stand 
and speak, he could act his part with the precision of a 
singer who has thoroughly learned his air. One who 
often acted with him informed me that when Kean was 
rehearsing on a new stage he accurately counted the 
number of steps he had to take before reaching a certain 
spot, or before uttering a certain word ; these steps were 
justly regarded by him as part of the mechanism which 
could no more be neglected than the accompaniment to 



8 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

an air could be neglected by a singer. Hence it was 
that he was always the same ; not always in the same 
health, not always in the same vigour, but always master 
of the part, and expressing it through the same symbols. 
The voice on some nights would be more irresistibly 
touching in ' But, oh ! the pity of it, Iago ! ' — or more 
musically forlorn in ' Othello's occupation's gone ' — or 
more terrible in ' Blood ; Iago ; blood, blood ! ' but always 
the accent and rhythm were unchanged ; as a Tamberiil: 
may deliver the C from the chest with more sonority one 
night than another, but always delivers it from the chest 
and never from the head. 

Kean was not only remarkable for the intensity of 
passionate expression, but for a peculiarity I have never 
seen so thoroughly realised by another, although it is one 
which belongs to the truth of passion, namely, the ex- 
pression of subsiding emotion. Although fond, far too 
fond, of abrupt transitions — passing from vehemence to 
familiarity, and mingling strong lights and shadows with 
Caravaggio force of unreality — nevertheless his instinct 
taught him what few actors are taught — that a strong 
emotion, after discharging itself in one massive current, 
continues for a time expressing itself in feebler currents. 



EDMUND KEAN. 



The waves are not stilled when the storm has passed 
away. There remains the ground- swell troubling the 
deeps. In watching Kean's quivering muscles and 
altered tones you felt the subsidence of passion. The 
voice might be calm, but there was a tremor in it ; the 
face might be quiet, but there were vanishing traces of 
the recent agitation. 

One of his means of effect — sometimes one of his 
tricks — was to make long pauses between certain phrases. 
For instance, on quitting the scene, Sir Edward Mortimer 
has to say warningly, ' Wilford, remember ! ' Kean used 
to pause after ' Wilford/ and during the pause his face 
underwent a rapid succession of expressions fluently 
melting into each other, and all tending to one climax of 
threat ; and then the deep tones of ' remember ! ' came 
like muttered thunder. Those spectators who were un- 
able to catch these expressions considered the pause a 
mere trick ; and sometimes the pauses were only tricks, 
but often they were subtle truths. 

Having been trained to the stage from his childhood, 
and being endowed with a remarkably graceful person, 
he was a master of scenic effect. He largely increased 
the stock of 'business,' which is the tradition of the 



io ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

stage. Hamlet, Othello, Richard, Shylock, Lear, Sir 
Giles Overreach, or Sir Edward Mortimer have been 
illuminated by him in a way neither actors nor playgoers 
commonly suspect. It is his reading of the parts, his 
1 points,' that we applaud. He was a real innovator. 
But the parts he could play were few. He had no 
gaiety ; he could not laugh ; he had no playfulness that 
was not as the playfulness of a panther showing her 
claws every moment. Of this kind was the gaiety of 
his Richard III. Who can ever forget the exquisite 
grace with which he leaned against the side-scene while 
Anne was railing at him, and the chuckling mirth of his 
* Poor fool ! what pains she takes to damn herself ! ' It 
was thoroughly feline — terrible yet beautiful. • 

He had tenderness, wrath, agony, and sarcasm at 
command. But he could not be calmly dignified ; nor 
could he represent the intellectual side of heroism. He 
was nothing if not passionate. I never saw his Hamlet 
which, however, was never considered one of his suc- 
cesses, though parts were intensely admired. He must 
have been puzzled what to do with many of the long 
speeches and the quiet scenes, and could have had no 
sympathy with the character. Yet Hamlet is the easiest 



EDMUND KEAN. 



of all Shakspeare's great parts for an actor of moderate 
ability. Othello, which is the most trying of all Shaks- 
peare's parts, was Kean's masterpiece. His Shylock was 
freer from fault, and indeed was a marvellous perform- 
ance. From the first moment that he appeared and 
leant upon his stick to listen gravely while moneys are 
requested of him, he impressed the audience, as Douglas 
Jen-old used to say, ' like a chapter of Genesis.' The 
overpowering remonstrant sarcasm of his address to 
Antonio, and the sardonic mirth of his proposition about 
the ' merry bond,' were fine preparations for the anguish 
and rage at the elopement of his daughter, and for the 
gloating anticipations of revenge on the Christians. 
Anything more impressive than the passionate recrimina- 
tion and wild justice of argument in his ' Hath not a Jew 
eyes ? ' has never been seen on our stage. 



12 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



CHAPTER II. 

CHARLES KEAN. 

To speak of the son immediately after the father is not 
only to follow out a natural suggestion, but to seize an 
excellent opportunity of elucidating some characteristics 
of both. It may press a little hard upon Charles Kean, 
but from the first he has been subject to this over- 
shadowing comparison. Like his father, he is an accom- 
plished swordsman, and thorough master of all the 
business of the stage ; like his father, he is endowed with 
great physical force, and is capable of abandoning him- 
self to the wildest expression of it without peril of a 
breakdown. Unlike his father, he is never careless ; he 
anxiously elaborates every scene to the utmost in his 
power, never throwing a chance away, never failing 
except from lack of means. He is not only a re- 
spectable and respected member of his profession, he has 
the real artist's love of his art, and pride in it, and he 



CHARLES KEAN. 13 

always does his best. Laughed at, ridiculed, and hissed, 
and for many years terribly handled by critics, both in 
public and private, he has worked steadily, resolutely, 
improvingly, till his brave perseverance has finally con- 
quered an eminent position. He began by being a very 
bad actor; he has ended by forcing even such of his 
critics as have least sympathy with him to admit that in 
certain parts he is without a rival on our stage. This 
battle with the public he has fought by inches. Slowly 
the force that is in him, concentrated on the one object 
of his life, has made an actor out of very unpromising 
materials. His career is a lesson. It shows what can 
and what cannot be done by courageous devotion and a 
burning desire to learn the resources of an art. The 
stamping, spluttering, ranting, tricky actor, who in his 
' sallet days ' excited so much mirth and so much blame y 
has became remarkable for the naturalness and forcible 
quietness with which he plays certain parts. He is still 
unhappily given to rant when he has to express strong 
emotion ; but rant is the resource of incompetence in all 
actors of tragic characters ; and it is only on occasions of 
excitement that he falls into this mistake. On other 
occasions he is calm and forcible. 



14 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

I must confess that it has never been an intellectual 
treat to me to see Charles Kean play Shakspeare's tragic 
heroes, but I doubt whether even his great father could 
liave surpassed him in certain melodramatic parts. I am 
unable to speak of his Louis XI. — by many considered 
his finest performance — but I can easily believe that it 
was as superior to the representation of Ligier, on which 
it was modelled, as his performance of the Corsican 
Brothers was to that of Fechter, which also served him 
as a model. In the lighter scenes of the two first acts of 
the ' Corsican Brothers ' he wanted the graceful ease of 
Fechter ; but in the more serious scenes, and through- 
out the third act, he surpassed the Frenchman with all 
the weight and intensity of a tragic actor in situations for 
which the comedian is unsuited. The deadly quiet of a 
strong nature nerved to a great catastrophe — the sombre, 
fatal, pitiless expression — could not have been more 
forcibly given than by Charles Kean in this act ; and in 
the duel there was a stealthy intensity in every look and 
movement, which gave a shuddering fascination to the 
scenes altogether missed by Fechter. In ' Pauline/ also, 
Charles Kean showed similar power — quiet and terrible. 
Both his qualities and defects conspired to make these 



CHARLES KEAN. 15 

performances singularly effective, and revealed a first-rate 
melodramatic actor where hitherto we had known only a 
"bad tragedian. 

To some of my readers it may not be at first evident 
how an actor can be really great in melodrame and weak 
in tragedy. Yet they will have no difficulty in under- 
standing that a man may write admirable melodrames 
without even moderate success in attempting tragedies. 
The very qualities which ensure excellence in the one 
prepare the failure in the other. The tragic poet in- 
cludes the melodramatist. Strip ' Hamlet ' and ' Mac- 
beth ' of their poetry and psychology, and you have a 
fine melodramatic residuum. Sophocles and Shakspeare 
are as ' sensational ' as Fitzball and Dumas ; but the 
situations, which in the latter are the aim and object of 
the piece, to which all the rest is subordinated, in the 
former are the mere starting-points, the nodes of 
dramatic action. A melodramatic actor is required, to 
be impressive, to paint in broad, coarse outlines, to give 
relief to an exaggerated situation ; he is not required to 
be poetic, subtle, true to human emotion ; for the scene 
he presents and the language he speaks are removed into 
an unreal, unideal sphere, i.e. a sphere which is not that 
of reality nor of poetic idealism. 



16 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

No sooner does Charles Kean attempt one of Shak- 
speare's flexible and human characters than the inflexible 
nature of his talent places him in conspicuous inferiority 
not only to his great father but to all fine actors. The 
fluency of Shakspeare's movements, the subtle inter- 
penetration of thought and emotion, the tangled web of 
motives, the mingling of the heroic with the familiar, the 
presence of constant verisimilitude under exceptional 
and exaggerated conditions, all demand great flexibility 
of conception and expression in the actor, great sympathy 
of imagination, nicety of observation, and variety of 
mimetic power. In these Charles Kean is wholly defi- 
cient. He has the power of coarse painting, of im- 
pressive representation when the image to be presented 
is a simple one ; but he has no subtlety of sympathy, no 
nicety of observation, no variety of expression. . He is 
peculiarly rigid — this is his force and his weakness : ' he 
moveth altogether if he move at all.' His face is utterly 
without physiognomical play ; one stolid expression, 
immovable as an ancient mask, is worn throughout a 
scene which demands fluctuating variety. He has none 
of those unforgettable looks which made his father 
terrible to fellow-actors no less than to spectators. There 



CHARLES KEAN. i 7 

has never been the smallest danger of his frightening 
an actress into fits, as Edmund Kean is said to have 
frightened Mrs. Glover — a story I suspect to be some- 
what mythical, but a story which indicates the mighty 
power of Kean's glare and the ghastly convulsion of his 
rage. 

It is because there is no presence of poetry in his 
acting that we all feel Charles Kean to be essentially a 
melodramatic actor. The unreality and unideality of a 
melodrama are alike suited to his means. If he attempt 
to portray real emotion, he leaves us cold ; if he attempt 
to indicate a subtle truth, it is done so clumsily and so 
completely from the outside conventional view that we 
are distressed. He has no sympathy with what is 
heroic. He wants nicety of observation and expression 
for what is real. 

Let us consider his voice, that being the actor's most- 
potent instrument of expression. It is harsh and rasping; 
so, indeed, was the voice of his father in its upper range 
(though less so), but in its lower range it was marvel- 
lously musical, and had tones of a searching pathos never 
heard since. Partly because of the voice which is in- 
flexible, but mainly because of an insensibility to rhyth- 



18 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

mic modulation, Charles Kean cannot deliver a passage 
with musical effect. The stubborn harshness of the 
voice, and the mechanicalness of his elocution, spoil even 
his best efforts. The tones of his father vibrate still in 
the memories of those who years ago trembled deliciously 
beneath their influence \ and render even pathetic phrases 
powerless when spoken by his successors, because the 
successors cannot utter them with such ' ravishing divi- 
sion.' When Charles Kean as Richard delivers the 

speech — 

Now is the winter of our discontent 

no one notices it ; but who can ever forget his father's 
look and voice ? Who can forget the thrilling effect of 
the rich deep note upon ' buried ,' when with the graceful 
curl of the wrist he indicated how the clouds which 
lowered round his head were in the deep bosom of the 
ocean buried ? 

Voice, look, and gesture are the actor's symbols, 
through which he makes intelligible the emotions of the 
character he is personating. No amount of sensibility 
will avail unless it can express itself adequately by these 
symbols. It is not enough for an actor to feel, he must 
represe?it. He must express his feelings in symbols 



CHARLES KEAN. 19 

universally intelligible and affecting. A harsh, inflexible 
voice, a rigid or heavy face, would prevent even a Shaks- 
peare from being impressive and affecting on the stage ; 
whereas a man, with little sensibility, but endowed 
with a sympathetic penetrating voice, and a flexible 
physiognomy would rouse the pit to transports. 

It is clear that Charles Kean has an organisation 
which excludes him from the artistic expression of com- 
plex or subtle emotions. And it was to this I alluded 
in saying that his perseverance had made an actor out 
of very unpromising materials. There are no tears in his 
pathos; there is no terror in his wrath. He is violent 
where he should be agitating, lachrymose where he 
should be affecting. He has been acting tragic parts 
for more than thirty years; I should be very much 
surprised to learn that he had once drawn a tear ; the 
pathos of a situation may have sometimes overcome a 
susceptible spectator, but this effect is not to be set 
down to the actor. The tears lie very near the sur- 
face with me, but I never felt their sources stirred by any 
look or tone from him. 

In Edmund Kean the ground-swell of subsiding 
emotion was, as I have noted, very finely indicated. In 



2o ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

Charles Kean there is no trace of it. He passes from 
excessive vehemence to perfect calmness, without 
either voice or look betraying any fluent continuity be- 
tween the two. The fact is that he never imaginatively 
identifies himself with a passion; otherwise, even his 
stubborn physique would express something of it, 
though inadequately. 

Edmund Kean's elocution was often careless and 
ineffective, especially in level passages. But his musical 
ear and musical voice saved him from the monotony so 
disagreeable in the elocution of his son, and saved him 
from that still more unpardonable defect, the dissocia- 
tion of rhythm from meaning. Instead of making the 
rhythm fluent with the meaning, and allowing emphasis 
and pause to fall in the places where naturally the thought 
becomes emphatic and pauses, he suffers them to be very 
much determined by the formal structure of the verse — 
as if the sense ended with the line — or by the duration of 
his breath. 

Emphasis and pause are indeed the supreme difficul- 
ties of elocution. They are rarely managed by those 
who read blank verse, even in a room, and on the stage 
the difficulty is greatly enhanced. Nevertheless no 






CHARLES KEAN. 21 

one can pretend to be an actor of the poetic drama 
who has not mastered this art ; although at the present 
day it is, like many other requisites, boldly disregarded, 
and we hear the noblest verse spouted (not spoken) 
with the remorseless indifference of that actor who an- 
nounced himself thus : 

'Tis I, my lord, the early village cock. 

Edmund Kean had no gaiety, no humour. His son, 
although also destitute of both, is nevertheless very 
comic in one or two characters, notably Ford in the 
* Merry Wives of Windsor.' The very inflexibility of his 
face here gives him real comic force. Precisely because 
his features will not express any fluctuations of feeling, 
they are admirably suited to express the puzzled, won- 
dering stolidity of the jealous, bamboozled husband. It 
is this inflexibility, combined with a certain animal force, 
which makes his melodramatic personations so effective. 

Edmund Kean did much for Shakspeare. The act- 
ing edition of our great dramatist may now almost be 
said to be based upon his conceptions of the leading 
parts. He invented much. His own quick, passionate 
sympathy saw effects where other actors had seen no- 



22 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

thing. But I suspect that he had only the actor's feeling 
for the dramatist, and cared little about him as a poet. 
Charles Kean has more literary culture, and has shown a 
more literary ambition. He has added nothing to the 
elucidation of the characters, he has given no fresh light 
to players or public; but he has greatly improved the 
scenic representation, and has lavished time and money 
on the archaeological illustration of the plays. He has 
striven for public applause by appealing to the public 
taste, and he has gained that applause. Those who, 
like myself, care a great deal about acting and very little 
about splendid dresses, must nevertheless confess that 
what Charles Kean professed to do in the way of scenic 
illustration, he did splendidly and successfully. 



RACHEL. 



CHAPTER III. 

RACHEL. 

Rachel was the panther of the stage ; with a panther's 
terrible beauty and undulating grace she moved and 
stood, glared and sprang. There always seemed some- 
thing not human about her. She seemed made of 
different clay from her fellows — beautiful but not love- 
able. Those who never saw Edmund Kean may form a 
very good conception of him if they have seen Rachel. 
She was very much as a woman what he was as a man. 
If he was a lion, she was a panther. 

Her range, like Kean's, was very limited, but her ex- 
pression was perfect within that range. Scorn, triumph, 
rage, lust and merciless malignity she could represent in 
symbols of irresistible power; but she had little tenderness, 
no womanly caressing softness, no gaiety, no heartiness. 
She was so graceful and so powerful that her air of 
dignity was incomparable \ but somehow you always felt 



24 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

in her presence an indefinable suggestion of latent 
wickedness. By the side of Pasta she would have ap- 
peared like a beautiful devil beside a queenly woman : 
with more intellect, more incisive and impressive power, 
but with less soul, less diffusive and subduing influence. 

In her early days nothing more exquisite could be 
heard than her elocution — it was musical and artistically 
graduated to the fluctuations of meaning. Her thrilling 
voice, flexible, penetrating, and grave, responded with 
the precision of a keyed instrument. Her thin, nervous 
frame vibrated with emotion. Her face, which would 
have been common, had it not been aflame with genius, 
was capable of intense expression. Her gestures were 
so fluent and graceful that merely to see her would have 
been a rare delight. The ideal tragedies of Racine, 
which ignorant Englishmen call ' cold,' were, by her in- 
terpretation, shown to be instinct with passion and 
dramatic effect. But this was only in her early days. 
Later in her career she grew careless ; played her parts 
as if only in a hurry to get through them, flashing out 
now and then with tremendous power, just to show what 
she could do ; and resembling Kean in the sacrifice of 
the character to a few points. She, whose elocution had 



RACHEL. 25 

been incomparable, so delicately shaded were its various 
refinements and so sustained its music, came at last to 
gabble, and to mash up her rhythm till the verses were 
often unintelligible and generally ineffective. After the 
gabble she paused upon some well-known point, and 
flung upon it all the emphasis of her power. In what I 
have to say of her, I shall speak only of her acting in its 
better days, for it is that to which memory naturally 
recurs. 

The finest of her performances was of Phedre. 
Nothing I have ever seen surpassed this picture of a soul 
torn by the conflicts of incestuous passion and struggling 
conscience ; the unutterable mournfulness of her look 
and tone as she recognised the guilt of her desires, yet 
felt herself so possessed by them that escape was impos- 
sible, are things never to be forgotten. What a picture 
she was as she entered ! You felt that she was wasting 
away under the fire within, that she was standing on the 
verge of the grave with pallid face, hot eyes, emaciated 
frame— an awful ghastly apparition. The slow deep 
mournful toning of her apostrophe to the sun, especially 
that close — 

Soleil ! je te viens voir pour la derniere fois — 



26 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

produced a thrill which vibrates still in memory. The 
whole of the opening scene, with one exception, was 
inexpressibly affecting and intensely true. As an ideal 
representation of real emotion, it belonged to the highest 
art The remorseful lines — 

-Graces au ciel, mes mains ne sont point criminelles : 
Plut aux dieux que mon cceur fut innocent comme elles — 

were charged with pathos. And how finely expressed 
was the hurrying horror with, as it were, a shiver between 
each phrase, transient yet vividly indicated, when she con- 
fessed her guilt ; — 

Tu vas ouir le comble des horreurs . . . 
J'aime . . . a ce nom fatal, je tremble, je frissonne . . . 

(and her whole frame here quivered) 

J'aime . . . 

(Enone. — Qui? 

Phedre. — Tu connais ce fils de 1' Amazone, 

Ce prince si longtemps par moi-meme opprime . . . 
(Enone. — Hippolyte ! Grands dieux ! 
Phedre. — Cest toi qui Pas nomine. 

The one point in this scene to which I took excep- 
tion was the mode of rendering the poet's meaning in 
this magnificent apostrophe, taken from Euripides, ' Cest 
toi qui l'as nomme.' She uttered it in a tone of sorrow- 



RACHEL. 27 



ing reproach which, as I conceive, is psychologically at 
variance with the character and the position. For Phedre 
has kept her love a secret ; it Is a horrible crime ; she 
cannot utter the name of Hippolyte because of her 
horror at the crime; and not in sadness but in the sophistry 
of passion, she tries indignantly to throw on (Enone the 
guilt of naming that which should be unnameable. 

In the second act, where Phedre declares her passion 
to Hippolyte, Rachel was transcendent. She subtly con- 
trived to indicate that her passion was a diseased passion, 
fiery and irresistible, yet odious to her and to him. She 
was marvellous in the abandonment to this onward- 
sweeping madness ; her manner was fierce and rapid, as 
if the thoughts were crowding on her brain in tumult, and 
she dared not pause to consider them ; and such was the 
amazing variety and compass of her expression that when 
she quitted the stage she left us quivering with an excite • 
ment comparable only to that produced by Kean in the 
third act of ' Othello.' In the fourth act came the 
storm of rage, jealousy, and despair : it was lit up by 
wonderful flashes. Like . Kean, she had a power of con- 
centrating into a single phrase a world of intense feeling ; 



28 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

and even Kean himself could not have surpassed the 
terrific exclamation — 

Miserable ! et je vis ! 

Whoever saw Rachel play Phedre may be pardoned 
if he doubt whether he will ever see such acting again. 

Hermione, in l Andromaque,' was also another very 
fine part of hers, especially in the two great scenes with 
Pyrrhus. In the first, her withering sarcasm, calm, 
polished, implacable, was beyond description ; in the 
second she displayed her manifold resources in express- 
ing rage, scorn, grief, and defiance. In her eyes charged 
with lightning, in her thin convulsive frame, in the 
spasms of her voice, changing from melodious clearness 
to a hoarseness that made us shudder, the demoniac 
element was felt. With touching and forlorn grace 
she revealed the secret of her heart in the lines : — 

Malgre le juste horreur que son crime me donne, 
Tant qu'il vivra craignez que je ne lui pardonne ; 
Doutez jusqu'a sa mort d'un courroux incertain : 
S'il ne meurt aujourd'hui/*? puis V aimer demain. 

In describing how she will avenge the insult to her 
beauty by slaying Pyrrhus — 

Je percerai le coeur que je n'ai pu toucher — 



RACHEL. 29 



her wail was so piercing and so musical that the whole 
audience rose in a transport to applaud her ; and diffi- 
cult as it was to prevent an anticlimax after such an 
effect, she crowned the scene with the exclamation of 
jealous threat when bidding him hasten to his mis- 
tress : — 

Va, cours ; mais crams encore d'y trouver Hermione. 

The close was in the same high strain. The fine 
passionate speech in which she upbraids Orestes for 
having followed her orders and slain Pyrrhus (a speech 
which may be commended to those who fancy Racine 
is cold) was delivered as nobody but Rachel could de 
liver it. 

Very noticeable it is that Rachel could not speak 
prose with even tolerable success ; deprived of the 
music of verse, and missing its ictus, she seemed quite 
incapable of managing the easy cadences of colloquial 
prose. The subtle influence of rhythm seemed to pene- 
trate her, and gave a movement and animation to her 
delivery which was altogether wanting in her declamation 
of prose. Hence, among other reasons, the failure of 
her attempts in modern drama. As Kean was only 



3o ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

truly great in Shakspeare and Massinger, Rachel was 
only truly herself in Racine and Corneille. 

In the ' Polyeucte ; of Corneille she had one scene of 
incomparable grandeur, where, baptized in the blood of 
her martyred husband, she exclains, — 

Son sang dont tes bourreaux viennent de me couvrir 
M'a desille les yeux, et me les vient d'ouvrir. 
Je vois, je sais, je crois ! 

The climbing exultation and radiant glory of the inspired 
convert, her face lighted with fervour, her whole frame 
trembling with the burden of overpowering thoughts, 
were fitly succeeded by the uplifting of her arms to 
heaven, while an expression of such fervent aspiration 
glowed in her features that she seemed a martyr wel- 
coming the death which was the portal to eternal bliss. 
As an example of ' face-acting ' should be cited the very 
remarkable scene in ' Les Horaces,' in which she stands 
silent during the long recital of her lover's death. 

Rachel tried once or twice to play Moliere. I did not 
see these attempts, which were pitilessly criticized by 
Jules Janin, but I am convinced that they were mis- 
takes. She was wholly unsuited to comedy, unless it 
were comedy like that of Madame Girardin's Lady 



RACHEL. 31 



Tartufe, in which I thought her graceful, ladylike, 
and diabolical — very admirable in the way she thoroughly 
identified herself with the character, making its odious- 
ness appear so thoroughly easy and unconscious that you 
almost doubted whether after all the woman were so 
odious. The manner in which Rachel walked to the fire- 
place, placed her gloves on the mantelpiece, and her 
right foot on the fender, as she began the great scene 
with her lover, was of itself a study. The sleek hypocrisy 
of the part was not exaggerated, nor was the cruel irony 
colder or crueller than seemed natural to such a woman ; 
it was like the occasional gleam of it in ' Bajazet,' espe- 
cially where Roxane is assured that Bajazet loves her still, 
and she replies, smiling with calm, bitter superiority — 

II y va de sa vie, an moins, que je le croie. 

It would form an interesting question why actors so 
transcendent as Kean and Rachel should have been 
singularly limited in the range of characters they could 
play with effect — why, being confessedly great in a few 
difficult parts, they could not be even tolerable in many 
parts less difficult and demanding the same kind of 
talent. But as this is a question I am not prepared to 
answer, I content myself with calling attention to it. 



32 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



CHAPTER IV. 

MAC READY. 

In Edmund Kean and Rachel we recognise types of 
genius ; in Macready I see only a man of talent, but of 
talent so marked and individual that it approaches very 
near to genius ; and, indeed, in justification of those 
admirers who would claim for him the higher title, I 
may say that Tieck, whose opinion on such a matter 
will be received with great respect, told me that Mac- 
ready seemed to him a better actor than either Kean or 
John Kemble ; and he only saw Macready in the early 
part of his long and arduous career. 

Of John Kemble I cannot, of course, speak. And 
with respect to Kean, while claiming for him the in- 
disputable superiority in the highest reaches of his art, I 
should admit that he was inferior to Macready in that 
general flexibility of talent and in that range of intel- 
lectual sympathy which are necessary to the personation 



M ACRE AD Y. 33 



of many and various parts. In this sense Macready was 
the better actor. And he showed it also in another 
striking difference. Kean created scarcely any new 
parts : with the exception of Bertram, Brutus and Sir 
Edward Mortimer all his attempts with modern plays 
were more or less failures. He gave the stamp of his 
own great power to Shylock, Othello, Sir Giles Over- 
reach, and Richard ; but he could not infuse life into 
Virginius or Tell, nor would he, perhaps, have suc- 
ceeded with Werner, Richelieu, Claude Melnotte, Ruy 
Gomez, and the fifty other parts which Macready 
created. It is worthy of note that Kean was greatest 
in the greatest parts, and seemed to require the wide 
range of Shakspearian passion for his arena ; whereas 
Macready was greatest in parts like Werner, Richelieu, 
Iago, or Virginius, and always fell short when represent- 
ing the great Shakspearian hero. 

Macready had a voice powerful, extensive in compass, 
capable of delicate modulation in quiet passages (though 
with a tendency to scream in violent passages), and having 
tones that thrilled and tones that stirred tears. His 
declamation was mannered and unmusical ; yet his in- 
telligence always made him follow the winding meanings 

D 



34 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

through the involutions of the verse, and never allowed 
you to feel, as you feel in the declamation of Charles 
Kean and many other actors, that he was speaking words 
which he did not thoroughly understand. The trick of a 
broken and spasmodic rhythm might destroy the music 
proper to the verse, but it did not perplex you with false 
emphasis or intonations wandering at hazard. His 
person was good, and his face expressive. 

We shall perhaps best understand the nature of his 
talent by thinking of the characters he most successfully 
personated. They were many and various, implying 
great flexibility in his powers ; but they were not cha- 
racters of grandeur, physical or moral. They were 
domestic rather than ideal, and made but slight appeals 
to the larger passions which give strength to heroes. He 
was irritable where he should have been passionate, 
querulous where he should have been terrible. 

In Macbeth, for example, nothing could be finer than 
the indications he gave of a conscience wavering under 
the influence of l fate and metaphysical aid,' superstitious, 
and weakly cherishing the suggestions of superstition; 
but nothing could have been less heroic than his presenta- 
tion of the great criminal. He was fretful and impatient 
under the taunts and provocations of his wife ; he was 



M ACRE AD Y. 35 



ignoble under the terrors of remorse ; he stole into the 
sleeping-chamber of Duncan like a man going to purloin 
a purse, not like a warrior going to snatch a crown. 

In Othello, agahi, his passion was irritability, and his 
agony had no grandeur. His Hamlet I thought bad, 
due allowance being made for the intelligence it dis- 
played. He was lachrymose and fretful : too fond of a 
cambric pocket-handkerchief to be really affecting ; nor, 
as it seemed to me, had he that sympathy with the cha- 
racter which would have given an impressive unity to his 
performance — it was ' a thing of shreds and patches,' 
not a whole. In King John, Richard II., Iago, and 
Cassius, all his great qualities were displayed. In Werner, 
he represented the anguish of a weak mind prostrate, with 
a pathos almost as remarkable as the heroic agony of 
Kean's Othello. The forlorn look and wailing accent 
when his son retorts upon him his own plea, ' Who taught 
me there were crimes made venial by the occasion ? ' are 
not to be forgotten. Nor was the fiery impatience of his 
Cassius less remarkable; it was just the kind of passion 
he could best express. 

In tenderness Macready had few rivals. He could 
exhibit the noble tenderness of a father in Virginius, 



36 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

as well as the chivalrous tenderness of a lover. None of 
the young men whom I have seen play Claude Melnotte 
had the youthfulness of Macready in that part; you 
lost all sense of his sixty years in the fervour and resilient 
buoyancy of his manner; and when he paced up and 
down before the footlights, describing to the charming 
Pauline with whom his Melnotte is memorably associated 
— Helen Faucit — the home where love should be, his voice, 
look, and bearing had an indescribable effect. It was 
really a rare sight to witness Claude Melnotte and Lear 
played by the same actor in the same week. The fretful 
irritability of the senile king was admirably rendered ; 
he almost succeeded in making the character credible ; 
and although the terrific curse was probably delivered by 
Kean with incomparably more grandeur, the screaming 
vehemence of Macready was quite in keeping with the 
irritability of the earlier scenes. 

He was a thorough artist, very conscientious, very 
much in earnest, and very careful about all the resources 
of his art. Hence he was always picturesque in his 
costume. Often, indeed, his ' get up ' was such that, to 
use a common phrase, he seemed to have stepped from 
the canvass of one of the old masters. 



M ACRE AD Y. 37 



Compared with anyone we have seen since upon our 
stage, Macready stands at such an immeasurable height 
that there must needs be a strange perplexity in the minds 
of his admirers on learning that while Kean and Young 
were still upon the stage, Macready was very frequently 
called a ' mere melodramatic actor.' In any sense which 
I can affix to this phrase it is absurd. He was by nature 
unsuited for some great tragic parts ; but by his intelli- 
gence he was fitted to conceive, and by his organisation 
fitted to express characters, and was not like a melodra- 
matic actor — limited to situations. Surely Lear, King 
John, Richard II., Cassius, and Iago are tragic parts ? In 
these he was great : nor could he be surpassed in certain 
aspects of Macbeth and Coriolanus, although he wanted 
the heroic thew and sinew to represent these characters 
as wholes. 

He did not belong to the stately declamatory school 
of Kemble, but in all parts strove to introduce as much 
familiarity of detail as was consistent with ideal presenta- 
tion. His touches of ' nature ' were sometimes a little 
out of keeping with the general elevation of the perform- 
ance, and he was fond of making a ' point ' by an abrupt 
transition from the declamatory to the conversational; 



38 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

but whenever he had an emotion to depict he depicted it 
sympathetically and not artificially ; by which I mean 
that he felt himself to be the person, and having identified 
himself with the character, sought by means of the symbols 
of his art to express what that character felt ; he did not 
stand outside the character and try to express its emotions 
by the symbols which had been employed for other cha- 
racters by other actors. There is. a story told of him. 
which may be exaggerated, or indeed may not be true of 
him, but which at any rate illustrates so well the very im- 
portant point now under notice, that it may be repeated 
here. In the great scene of the third act of the c Merchant 
of Venice,' Shylock has to come on in a state of intense 
rage and grief at the flight of his daughter. Now it is 
obviously a great trial for the actor ' to strike twelve at 
once.' He is one moment calm in the green-room, and 
the next he has to appear on the stage with his whole 
nature in an uproar. Unless he has a very mobile tem- 
perament, quick as flame, he cannot begin this scene at. 
the proper state of white heat. Accordingly, we see 
actors in general come bawling and gesticulating, but 
leaving us unmoved because they are not moved them- 
selves. Macready, it is said, used to spend some minutes. 



M ACRE AD Y. 



behind the scenes, lashing himself into an imaginative 
rage by cursing sotto voce, and shaking violently a ladder 
fixed against the wall. To bystanders the effect must 
have been ludicrous. But to the audience the actor pre- 
sented himself as one really agitated. He had worked 
himself up to the proper pitch of excitement which would 
enable him to express the rage of Shylock. 

I have heard Madame Vestris tell a similar story of 
Liston, whom she # overheard cursing and spluttering to 
himself, as he stood at the side scene waiting to go on in 
a scene of comic rage. 



Let me add to this estimate of Macready's powers, 
the brief account I wrote in 185 1 of his farewell per- 
formance. 

On Wednesday night this expected ' solemnity,' as 
the French phrase it, attracted an audience such as the 
walls of Drury have not enclosed for many a long year. 
Fortunately, the most rigorous precautions had been 
taken against overcrowding and occasion for disputes, so 
that the compact mass of beings was by no means 
chaotic. Every seat installs, boxes, and slips had been 



40 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

taken long before. Only the pit and galleries had to 
scramble for places, and by two o'clock the most patient 
and provident were waiting outside. Fancy the weari- 
ness of those four hours' attendance ! Vinegar-yard 
and Little Russell-street were dense with masses of ex- 
pectant, jubilant, sibilant, 'chaffing,' swearing, shouting 
men ; and there was no slight crowd to see the crowd. 
As an immense favour, I was offered two places in 
the ' basket ' (as they call it), at the back of the upper- 
most boxes ; and, in the innocence of my heart, I paid for 
those places, into which I would not have crammed 
a dog of any gentility. But I was rescued from this re- 
hearsal of Purgatory without its poetry, by the bene- 
ficence of a friend, whose private box was almost as 
capacious as his generosity • so that, instead of an 
imperfect view of the scene, I commanded the whole 
house. And what a sight that was ! how glorious, trium- 
phant, affecting, to see everyone starting up, waving 
hats and handkerchiefs, stamping, shouting, yelling their 
friendship at the great actor, who now made his ap- 
pearance on that stage where he was never more to 
reappear ! There was a crescendo of excitement enough 
to have overpowered the nerves of the most self-pos- 



MACREADY. 41 



sessed ; and when after an energetic fight — which 
showed that the actor's powers bore him gallantly up to 
the last — he fell pierced by Macduff's sword, this death, 
typical of the actor's death, this last look, this last act of 
the actor, struck every bosom with a sharp and sudden 
blow, loosening a tempest of tumultuous feeling such as 
made applause an ovation. 

Some little time was suffered to elapse wherein we re- 
covered from the excitement, and were ready again to 
burst forth as Macready the Man, dressed in his plain 
black, came forward to bid ' Farewell, a long farewell to 
all his greatness/ As he stood there/ calm but sad, 
waiting till the thunderous reverberations of applause 
should be hushed, there was one little thing which 
brought the tears into my eyes, viz., the crape hatband and 
black studs, that seemed to me more mournful and more 
touching than all this vast display of sympathy : it made 
me forget the paint and tinsel, the artifice and glare of an 
actor's life, to remember how thoroughly that actor was a 
man — one of us, sharer of sorrows we all have known or 
all must know ! 

Silence was obtained at last ; and then in a quiet, sad 
tone, Macready delivered this address : — 



42 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

1 My last theatrical part is played, and, in accordance 
with long-established usage, I appear once more before 
you. Even if I were without precedent for the dis- 
charge of this act of duty, it is one which my own 
feelings would irresistibly urge upon me j for, as I look 
back on my long professional career, I see in it but one 
continuous record of indulgence and support extended to 
me, cheering me in my onward progress, and upholding 
me in most trying emergencies. I have, therefore, been 
desirous of offering you my parting acknowledgments for 
the partial kindness with which my humble efforts have 
uniformly been received, and for a life made happier by 
your favour. The distance of rive-and-thirty years has 
not dimmed my recollection of the encouragement which 
gave fresh impulse to the inexperienced essays of my 
youth, and stimulated me to perseverance when struggling 
hardly for equality of position with the genius and talent 
of those artists whose superior excellence I ungrudgingly 
admitted, admired, and honoured. That encouragement 
helped to place me, in respect to privileges and emolu- 
ment, on a footing with my distinguished competitors. 
With the growth of time your favour seemed to grow ; 
and undisturbed in my hold on your opinion, from year 



M ACRE AD Y. 43. 



to year I found friends more closely and thickly cluster- 
ing round me. All I can advance to testify how justly 
I have appreciated the patronage thus liberally awarded 
me is the devotion throughout those years of my best 
energies to your service. My ambition to establish a 
theatre, in regard to decorum and taste, worthy of our 
country, and to leave in it the plays of our divine Shak- 
speare fitly illustrated, was frustrated by those whose 
duty it was, in virtue of the trust committed to them, 
themselves to have undertaken the task. But some good 
seed has yet been sown ; and in the zeal and creditable 
productions of certain of our present managers we have 
assurance that the corrupt editions and unseemly pre- 
sentations of past days will never be restored, but that 
the purity of our great poet's text will henceforward be 
held on our English stage in the reverence it ever should 
command. I have little more to say. By some the 
relation of an actor to his audience is considered slight 
and transient. I do not feel it so. The repeated 
manifestation, under circumstances personally affecting 
me, of your favourable sentiments towards me, will live 
with life among my most grateful memories; and, because 
I would not willingly abate one jot in your esteem, I 



44 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

retire with the belief of yet unfailing powers, rather than 
linger on the scene, to set in contrast the feeble style of 
age with the more vigorous exertions of my better years. 
Words — at least such as I can command — are ineffectual 
to convey my thanks. In offering them, you will believe 
I feel far more than I give utterance to. With senti- 
ments of the deepest gratitude I take my leave, bidding 
you, ladies and gentlemen, in my professional capacity, 
with regret and most respectfully, farewell.' 

This was received with renewed applause. Perhaps 
a less deliberate speech would have better suited the 
occasion; a few words full of the eloquence of the 
moment would have made a deeper and more memorable 
impression ; but under such trying circumstances a man 
may naturally be afraid to trust himself to the inspiration 
of the moment. Altogether I must praise Macready for 
the dignity with which he retired, and am glad that he 
did not act. There was no ostentation of cambric 
sorrow; there was no well got-up broken voice to simu- 
late emotion. The manner was calm, grave, sad, and 
dignified. 

Macready retires into the respect of private life. A re- 
flection naturally arises on the perishableness of an actor's 



M ACRE AD Y. 45 



fame. He leaves no monument behind him but his 
name. This is often thought a hardship. I believe that 
great confusion exists in the public mind on this subject. 

It is thought a hardship that great actors in quitting 
the stage can leave no monument more solid than a 
name. The painter leaves behind him pictures to attest 
his power ; the author leaves behind him books ; the 
actor leaves only a tradition. The curtain falls — the 
artist is annihilated. Succeeding generations may be told 
of his genius ; none can test it. 

All this I take to be a most misplaced sorrow. With 
the best wishes in the world I cannot bring myself to 
place the actor on a level with the painter or the author. 
I cannot concede to the actor such a parity of intellec- 
tual greatness ; while, at the same time, I am forced to 
remember that, with inferior abilities, he secures far 
greater reward, both of pudding and praise. It is not 
difficult to assign the causes of an actor's superior 
reward, both in noisy reputation and in solid guineas. 
He amuses. He amuses more than the most amusing 
author. And our luxuries always cost us more than our 
necessities. Taglioni or Carlotta were better paid than 
Edmund Kean or Macready. Jenny Lind better than 
both put together. 



46 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

But while the dramatic artist appeals to a larger 
audience, and moves them more forcibly than either 
painter or author, owing to the very nature of his art, 
a very slight acquaintance with acting and actors will 
suffice to show there can be no parity in the rank of a 
great painter and a great actor. Place Kean beside 
Caravaggio (and, though I select the greatest actor I 
have known, I take a third-rate painter, not wishing to 
overpower the argument with such names as Raphael, 
Michel Angelo, Titian), and ask what comparison can 
be made of their intellectual qualifications ! Or take 
Macready and weigh him in the scale with Bulwer or 
Dickens. 

The truth is, we exaggerate the talent of an actor 
because we judge only from the effect he produces, with- 
out enquiring too curiously into the means. But, while 
the painter has nothing but his canvas and the author 
has nothing but white paper and printer's ink with which 
to produce his effects, the actor has all other arts as 
handmaids ; the poet labours for him, creates his part, 
gives him his eloquence, his music, his imagery, his 
tenderness, his pathos, his sublimity ; the scene-painter 
aids him ; the costumes, the lights, the music, all the 



M ACRE AD Y. 47 






fascination of the stage — all subserve the actor's effect : 
these raise him upon a pedestal ; remove them, and what 
is he ? He who can make a stage mob bend and sway 
with his eloquence, what could he do with a real mob, no 
poet by to prompt him ? He who can charm us with 
the stateliest imagery of a noble mind, when robed in the 
sables of Hamlet, or in the toga of Coriolanus, what can 
he do in coat and trousers on the world's stage ? Rub 
off the paint, and the eyes are no longer brilliant ! 
Reduce the actor to his intrinsic value, and then weigh 
him with the rivals whom he surpasses in reputation and 
in fortune. 

If my estimate of the intrinsic value of acting is lower 
than seems generally current, it is from no desire to dis- 
parage an art I have always loved ; but from a desire to 
state what seems to me the simple truth on the matter, 
and to show that the demand for posthumous fame is 
misplaced. Already the actor gets more fame than he 
deserves, and we are called upon to weep that he gets no 
more ! During his reign the applause which follows 
him exceeds in intensity that of all other claimants for 
public approbation • so long as he lives he is an object 
of strong sympathy and interest ; and when he dies he 



48 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

leaves behind him such influence upon his art as his 
genius may have effected (true fame ! ) and a monument 
to kindle the emulation of successors. Is not that 
enough ? Must he weep because other times will not see 
his acting? Must we weep because all that energy, 
labour, genius, if you will, is no more than a tradition ? 
Folly ! l In this crowded world how few there are who 
can leave even a name, how rare those who leave more. 
The author can be read by future ages ? Oh ! yes, he 
can be read : the books are preserved ; but is he read ? 
Who disturbs them from their repose upon the dusty 
shelves of silent libraries ? What are the great men of 
former ages, with rare, very rare, exceptions, but names 
to the world which shelves their well-bound volumes ? 

Unless some one will tell me in sober gravity (what 
is sometimes absurdly said in fulsome dinner speeches 
and foolish dedications) that the actor has a 'kindred 
genius' with the poet, whose creations he represents, 

1 The illustrious mathematician, Jacobi, in his old age, was once 
consoled by a flattering disciple with the remark that all future 
mathematicians would delight in his work. He drew down the 
corners of his mouth and said, despairingly, ' Yes ; but to think that 
all my predecessors knew nothing of my work ! ' Here was vanity 
hungrier than that of the actor. 



M ACRE AD Y. 49 



and that in sheer intellectual calibre Kean and Macready 
were nearly on a par with Shakspeare, I do not see what 
cause of complaint can exist in the actor's not sharing 
the posthumous fame of a Shakspeare. His fame while 
he lives surpasses that of almost all other men. Byron 
was not so widely worshipped as Kean. Lawrence and 
Northcote, Wilkie and Mulready, what space did they fill 
in the public eye compared with Young, Charles Kemble, 
or Macready ? Surely this renown is ample ? 

If Macready share the regret of his friends, and if he 
yearn for posthumous fame, there is yet one issue for him 
to give the world assurance of his powers. Shakspeare 
is a good raft whereon to float securely down the stream 
of time ; fasten yourself to that and your immortality is 
safe. Now Shakspeare must have occupied more of 
Macready's time and thought than any other subject. 
Let fruits be given. Let us have from him an edition 
of Shakspeare, bringing all his practical experience as an 
actor to illustrate this the first of dramatists. We want no 
more black letter. We want no more hyperboles of ad- 
miration. We want the draniatic excellences and defects 
illustrated and set forth. Will Macready undertake such 
a task? It would be a delightful object to occupy his 

E 



5o ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



leisure ; and it would settle the question as to his own 
intellectual claims. 

The foregoing was written in 185 1. This year, 1875, 
the ' Reminiscences and Diaries of Macready ' have been 
given to the world by Sir Frederick Pollock, and they 
strikingly confirm the justice of my estimate, which 
almost reads like an echo of what Macready himself ex- 
pressed. In those volumes we see the incessant study 
which this eminently conscientious man to the last be- 
stowed on every detail connected with his art • we see 
also how he endeavoured by study to make up for 
natural deficiencies, and how conscious he was of these 
deficiencies. We see him over-sensitive to the imaginary 
disrespect in which his profession is held, and throughout 
his career hating the stage, while devoting himself to the 
art. But although his sensitiveness suffered from many 
of the external conditions of the player's life, his own 
acceptance by the world was a constant rebuke to his 
exaggerated claims. He was undeniably a cultivated, 
honourable, and able man, and would have made an ex- 
cellent clergyman or member of Parliament ; but there is 
absolutely no evidence that he could have made such a 
figure either in the Church or Senate as would compare 
with that which he made upon the stage. 



FARREN. sr 



CHAPTER V. 

FARREN. 

That no one has been found to take the place of Farren 
has frequently been matter of regretful reproach on the 
part of critics and playgoers who forget that during the 
memory of living men no English actor has had the 
slightest pretension to rank with this rare and accom- 
plished comedian. If we of this generation have seen 
no other Sir Peter Teazle and Lord Ogleby, our fathers 
were no luckier. Farren, who began playing the old 
men at nineteen, and played them without a rival for 
nearly half a century, used to say of himself that he was 
a ' cock salmon,' the only fish of his kind in the market. 
And it would be a curious subject of enquiry why this 
was the case. In France they have had a few brilliant 
and many excellent representatives of what used to be 
called the ' Farren parts.' In Germany these parts have 
been filled as well as others \ but in England Farren has 



52 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

been without a rival, without even a modest rival. Blan- 
chard, Dowton, Fawcett, Bartley, are names which linger 
in the memories of playgoers — all good actors in their 
way, but not one of them conceivable in Sir Peter Teazle 
or Bertrand (in ' Bertrand et Raton '), Grandfather 
Whitehead, or the Country Squire (I purposely name 
parts embracing a wide range) ; and as to the ' old men * 
who have come since — non ragioniam di lor ! 

There was a certain elegance and distinction about 
Farren which made people constantly compare him with 
the best French actors. He had a marvellous eye for 
costume, and a quick appreciation of all the little details 
of manner. Flis face was handsome, with a wonderful 
hanging under-lip, capable of a great variety of expres- 
sion ; he had a penetrating voice, a clear articulation, a 
singularly expressive laugh ; and these qualities, coupled 
with a very close observation of characteristics, made him 
a finished actor — whom nobody cared about. 

When I say that nobody cared about him, I mean 
that, in spite of the unquestioned admiration of his talent, 
there was none of that personal regard usually felt for 
public favourites. Everybody applauded him; every- 
body admitted his excellences ; everybody was glad to 



FARREN. S3 



find his name on the bill, but no one went especially to 
see him. In theatrical phrase ' he never drew a house.' 
He would always ' strengthen a cast/ and has many a 
time determined the success of a piece. But that kind 
of fanaticism which popular actors excite in their admirers 
was never excited by him ; and I believe it was on this 
ground that he so rarely visited the provinces, where 
other actors reap the harvests sown in metropolitan 
reputations. 

Why was this ? Farren amused the public, and the 
public applauded him. Why was he less of a personal 
favourite than many an inferior actor ? It was owing, I 
conceive, to the parts he played, and to his manner of 
playing them. The parts were not those which appeal to 
general sympathy — they represented old age as either 
ridiculous or fretful, not venerable or pathetic. Crusty 
old bachelors, jealous old husbands, stormy fathers, 
worrying uncles, or ancient fops with ghastly pretensions 
to amiability — such were the types which he usually pre- 
sented to the public ; and when the types were more 
amiable or more humorous, there was a something in his 
manner which arrested a perfect sympathy. He had no 
.geniality; he had no gaiety. There was none of the 



54 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



fervid animation which acts like electricity upon the 
spectator. He was without unction. His laugh, wonder- 
ful as a senile chuckle, or as a gurgle of sensuality, had 
no ring of mirth in it. The comedy was high comedy 
which never lowered itself to farce ; but it also wanted 
some of the animal spirits and geniality which overflow 
in farce. 

A striking illustration of his talent and his want of 
loveable humour was presented by his performance of 
the simple cure in ' Secret Service/ a translation of a 
French piece in which Bouffe played the same part. 
Those who saw the two performances hesitated as to 
which was the more admirable, but no one could have 
doubted as to which was the more loveable man, the 
English or the French priest. The subject of the piece 
is the unconscious acting as a spy by a simple-minded 
old cure, who, having been at school with Fouche, applies 
to him for some employment that he may cease to be a 
burden on his niece. By a mistake in interpreting 
Fouche's order, the cure is set to do the work of a spy, 
in which his innocence of manner (supposed to be art) 
admirably assists him. The revulsion of feeling when he 
discovers the truth is a good dramatic opportunity, and 



FARREN. 55 



was pathetically rendered both by Farren and Bouffe, 
better by the latter because his whole organism was more 
sensitive. Up to this point, however, the character is 
one of adorable simplicity, and the way this was person- 
ated by the two great actors — each so individual, the one 
as English as the other was French — puzzled criticism to 
award the palm. But, nevertheless, we all left the theatre 
admiring Farren, and feeling an indefinable regard for 
Bouffe. I was not able to institute a similar comparison 
with Grandfather Whitehead, which was one of Farren's 
most successful performances in later years ; but I 
suspect that a similar difference would have been 
noticeable. 

Like all comic actors, Farren had a secret belief in 
his tragic powers. Nor is this general craving of come- 
dians for acceptance in tragedy a matter for- wonder or 
ridicule. A similar craving is felt by comic writers. It 
is an insurgence of self-respect against the implied dis- 
respect of laughter. No man likes to be classed with 
buffoons, although he may be willing enough now and 
then to vent his humour in buffoonery, or to excite your 
admiration by his powers of mimicking what is ridiculous. 
There has always been to me something pathetic in the 



56 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

thought of Liston, with his grave and serious turn of 
mind, his quick sensibilities, and his intense yearning for 
applause, fatally classed by Nature among those to whom 
tragic expression was impossible — feeling within him 
tragic capacity, and knowing that his face was a grotesque 
mask and his voice a suggestion of drollery. I think it 
not unlikely that, with another face and voice, Liston 
might have succeeded in tragedy ; but this is only saying 
that, had he been another man, he would have been 
another actor. His mistake lay in not perceiving that, 
with such physical qualifications, tragedy was impossible 
to him. With Farren the case was, I imagine, still more 
hopeless. The deficiency lay deeper. He could touch 
a chord of pathos gently, but he was quite incapable of 
expressing any powerful emotion. I saw him play the 
Hunchback — a part, indeed, originally intended for him 
by Knowles — and never saw a fine actor so utterly feeble. 
Once or twice, I believe, he tried the experiment of Shy- 
lock upon provincial audiences ; but he was not suffi- 
ciently encouraged to try it in London. 

Farren was emphatically the representative of gentle- 
men. His air of high-breeding was different in Lord 
Ogleby, Sir Peter Teazle, Sir Anthony Absolute, the 



FARREN. 57 
j 



Country Squire, and many other parts, but it had always 
the seal of distinction. He was also an actor whose fine- 
ness of observation gave an air of intellectual superiority 
even to his fools. I do not mean that he represented 
the fools as intellectual ; but that his manner of repre- 
senting them was such as to impress spectators with a 
high sense of his intellectual finesse. 

Yet I understand that in private he produced the 
contrary impression. He had certainly a very keen eye 
for a wide range of characteristics, and presented a 
greater variety of memorable types than any actor of his 
time ; and if it is true, as many assert, that off the stage 
he was rather stupid than otherwise, it only shows, what 
indeed requires no fresh proof, that acting is an art very 
much more dependent on special aptitudes than on general 
intellectual vigour ; a man may be a magnificent singer 
with the smallest philosophical endowments, and a mar- 
vellous actor with an amount of information which would 
deeply afflict Mrs. Marcet, or of critical insight which 
would excite the pity of a quarterly reviewer. We are 
too apt to generalise from a general term : we call a man 
clever because he surpasses his rivals • and as the word 
clever is used to designate any kind of superiority, we 



58 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

rashly conclude that a clever actor ought to be intellec- 
tually distinguished, and because he is a good mime he 
must be an acute thinker. 

Farren, undoubtedly, had in a high degree the intelli- 
gence necessary for his art, and the physical qualifica- 
tions which the art demanded ; whatever he may have 
been in private, he was eminently an intellectual actor, 
meaning by that phrase an actor who produced his effects 
not by the grotesqueness or drollery of his physique, but 
by the close observation and happy reproduction of cha- 
racteristics — i.e. not by appealing physically to our mirth- 
ful sensibilities, but indirectly through our intellectual 
recognition of the incongruous. 



CHARLES MATHEWS. 59 



CHAPTER VI. 

CHARLES MATHEWS. 

It has long been the opinion of playgoers and critics that 
Charles Mathews might fairly be classed with the best 
French actors in his own line ; and the success which- 
during two seasons he has achieved on the French stage 
is a striking confirmation of that opinion. Although he 
has been a great favourite with our public from the first 
night through the whole of his career, it is only of late 
years that he has displayed remarkable powers as a 
comedian. He was admired for his grace and elegance,, 
his ease and pleasant vivacity, and for a certain versatile 
power of mimicry ; but critics denied that he was a 
comedian, and I do not think the critics were unjust, so 
long as he confined himself to what are called ' character 
pieces,' and did not show his powers in ' character parts.* 
The difference between his performances in ' He would 
be an Actor ' or ' Patter versus Clatter,' and in ' The Game 



60 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



of Speculation ' or ' The Day of Reckoning/ is all the 
difference between a clever mimic and a fine comedian — 
between a lively caricaturist and a skilful portrait-painter. 
I have followed the career of this actor with delight. 
His first appearance, in ' Old and Young Stagers,' forms 
a pleasant landing-place in my memory as I wander back- 
wards. The incomparable Liston delayed his departure 
from the stage in order to protect the debiit of the son of 
his old colleague and friend, arid there have been few 
debfits more curiously expected and more cordially 
welcomed. It was known to ' the boxes ' that Charles 
Mathews had been made a pet of in many aristocratic 
families, and had acted in private circles at Rome, 
Florence, and Naples with singular success. It was 
known to ' the pit ' (in those days there were no stalls) 
that the son of the public favourite, though trained as an 
architect, had resolved to quit Pugin for Thespis ; and 
as the Olympic, under the management of Madame 
Vestris, was the theatre of the elegances and the home 
of pleasant mirthfulness, the appearance of the young 
artist at this theatre was in itself an event. But expec- 
tations such as these are as perilous to weak pretensions as 
they are encouraging to real talent; and if Charles Mathews 



CHARLES MATHEWS. 6r 

triumphed it was in virtue of very undeniable qualities.. 
Anything so airy and fascinating as this young man- 
had not been seen upon our stage. In general, theatres 
feel that the jeune premier is their weak point. He is 
bad enough in fiction ; but in fiction we do not see him, , 
whereas on the stage the weakness of the character is. 
usually aggravated by a 'bend in the back' and an im- 
placable fatuity. 

It is a rare assemblage of qualities that enables air 
actor to be sufficiently good-looking without being in- 
sufferably conceited, to be quiet without being absurdly 
insignificant, to be lively without being vulgar, to look 
like a gentleman, to speak and move like a gentleman,, 
and yet to be as interesting as if this quietness were only 
the restraint of power, not the absence of individuality. 
And the more pronounced the individuality, that is, the 
more impassioned or more vivacious the character re- 
presented, the greater is the danger of becoming offensive 
by exaggeration and coarseness. 

Charles Mathews was eminently vivacious : a nimble- 
spirit of mirth sparkled in his eye, and gave airiness to 
every gesture. He was in incessant movement without 
ever becoming obtrusive or fidgety. A ceitain grace 



62 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

tempered his vivacity; an innate sense of elegance 
rescued him from the exaggerations of animal spirits. 
' He wanted weight/ as an old playgoer once reproachfully 
said of him ; but he had the qualities of his defects, and 
the want of weight became delightful airiness. Whether 
he danced the Tarentella with charming Miss Fitzpatrick, 
or snatched up a guitar and sang, he neither danced like 
a dancer, nor sang like a singer, but threw the charm of 
a lively nature into both. I think I see him now in 
"'One Hour 7 seated opposite Madame Vestris, and 
made to subdue his restless impatience while he held 
her skeins of silk — a very drawing-room version of 
Hercules at the feet of Omphale — and I picture to 
myself how the majority of jeunes premiers would comport 
themselves in that position ! 

In our juvenile apprehensions he was the beau-ideal 
of elegance. We studied his costumes with ardent devo- 
tion. We envied him his tailor, and c made him our 
pattern to live and to die.' We could see no faults in 
him ; and all the criticisms which our elders passed on 
liim grated harshly in our ears as the croaking of 'fogies.' 
As a proof of my enthusiasm I may mention that I wrote 
a one-act comedy for him, at an age when anything less 



CHARLES MATHEWS. 63 

than five acts and blank verse seemed beneath the 
dignity of an aspiring author. (I will do him the justice 
to say that he did not accept it.) 

But if no faults were discernible then, I now see, in 
retrospect, that it was the charm of the man rather than 
any peculiar talent in the actor which carried him so 
successfully through those little Olympic pieces ; and 
that when he began to try his powers in more exacting 
parts — such as Charles Surface, for instance — there was 
still the old elegance, but not the old success. Practice 
and study, however, made him an accomplished comedian 
within a certain range, the limits of which are determined 
by his singular want of passionate expression. No good 
actor I have ever seen was so utterly powerless in the 
manifestation of all the powerful emotions : rage, scorn, 
pathos, dignity, vindictiveness, tenderness, and wild 
mirth are all beyond his means. He cannot even laugh 
with animal heartiness. He sparkles, he never explodes. 
Yet his keen observation, his powers of imitation, and a 
certain artistic power of preserving the unity of a cha- 
racter in all its details, are singularly shown in such parts 
as Lavater, Sir Charles Coldstream, Mr. Affable Hawk, 
and the villain in 'The Day of Reckoning.' 



64 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



This last-mentioned part was, unfortunately for him, 
excluded from his habitual repertory by the disagreeable 
nature of the piece. A French melodrame, never worth 
much even on the Boulevards, and still less adapted to 
the Lyceum audiences, afforded him an opportunity 
which I think is unique in his varied career, the opportu- 
nity of portraying a melodramatic villain j and he showed 
himself a great comedian in the way he portrayed it. 
Imagine a Count D'Orsay destitute alike of principle and 
of feeling, the incarnation' of heartless elegance, cool yet 
agreeable, admirable in all the externals which make men 
admired in society, and hateful in all the qualities tested 
by the serious trials of life : such was the Count presented 
by Charles Mathews. Instead of ■ looking the villain/ 
he looked like the man to whom all drawing-rooms would 
be flung open. Instead of warning away his victims by 
a countenance and manner more significant of villany 
than the description of the ' Hue and Cry,' he allured them 
with the graceful ease of a conscience quite at rest, and 
the manner of an assured acceptance. Whether the pit 
really understood this presentation, and felt it as a rare 
specimen of art, I cannot say; but I am sure that 
no critic capable of ridding himself of conventional 



CHARLES MATHEWS. 65 

prepossession would see 'such a bit of acting and for- 
get it. 

It is needless to speak of Jiis performance in 'The Game 
of Speculation/ the artistic merit of which was so great 
that it almost became an offence against morality, by 
investing a swindler with irresistible charms, and making 
the very audacity of deceit a source of pleasurable sym- 
pathy. Enough to say that all who had the opportunity 
of comparing this performance with that of the original 
actor of the part in France, declared that the superiority 
of Charles Mathews was incalculable. (I have since seen 
<^ot, the great comedian of the Theatre Frangais, in this 
part, yet I prefer Charles Mathews.) 

The multitude of characters, some of them excellent 
types, which he has portrayed, is so great that I cannot 
name a third of them. They had all one inestimable 
quality, that of being pleasant ; and the consequence is 
that he is an universal favourite. Indeed, the personal 
regard which the public feels for him is something extra- 
ordinary when we consider that it is not within the scope 
of his powers to move us by kindling any of our deeper 
sympathies. And it is interesting to compare this feel- 
ing of regard with its absence in the case of Farren. 

F 



66 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

Farren was assuredly a finer actor, and held a more 
undisputed position on the stage, for he had simply 
no rival at all. His career was long, and unvaryingly 
successful. Yet the public which applauded him as an 
actor did not feel much personal regard for him as a 
man ; whereas for Charles Mathews the feeling was not 
inaptly expressed by an elderly gentleman in the boxes of 
the Lyceum on the fall of the curtain one night after 
' The Game of Speculation ' : * And to think of such a 
man being in difficulties ! There ought to be a public 
subscription got up to pay his debts.' 



The reappearance of Charles Mathews in one of his 
favourite parts, in ' Used Up,' after having played that 
part with great success in Paris, naturally attracts large 
audiences to the Haymarket ; and, as I had not seen him 
play it for many years it drew me there, that I might enjoy 
what now becomes more and more of a rarity, a really fine 
bit of acting. Nor was my enjoyment balked, as far as 
he was concerned, although it would have been greater 
had there been a little more attention paid to the mounting 
of the piece. The Haymarket Theatre is, or rather pretends 



CHARLES MATHEWS. 67 

to be, our leading theatre for comedy. And on such a 
stage, or indeed on any stage, the insolent disregard of 
all artistic conditions which could permit such a perform- 
ance as that of Sir Adonis Leech by Mr. Rogers (an 
actor not without merit in certain characters), and which 
could allow a valet to be dressed like Mr. Clark, implies 
a state of facile acquiescence on the part of the public 
which explains the utter decay of the drama. As long 
as critics are silent and the groundlings laugh, such 
things will continue. If Mr. Rogers can be accepted as 
the representative of an English gentleman of our day, if 
aspect and bearing such as his can pass without protest, 
what can be the peculiar delight received from the exqui- 
site elegance and verisimilitude of Charles Mathews? 
My private conviction is that the majority of the audi- 
ence enjoyed the fun of the part with very little enjoy- 
ment of the acthtg ; and what deepens this conviction is 
that there was more applause in the second act, where 
the fun ' grows fast and furious,' and where the acting is 
indifferent, than in the first act, where the acting is per- 
fect and the fun mild. As the languorous man of fashion 
Charles Mathews is faultless. There is an exquisite 
moderation in his performance which shows a nice per- 



68 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

ception of nature. The coolness is never overdone. 
The languor is never obtruded. When the blacksmith is 
threatening him, there is nothing to suggest that he is 
assuming an attitude of indifference. From first to last 
we have a character, the integrity of which is never 
sacrificed to isolated effects. 

But in the second act, where the man of fashion 
appears as a ploughboy, all sense of artistic truth is 
wanting. There are two methods of carrying out the dra- 
matic conception of this act — one which should present 
a ploughboy, with enough verisimilitude to deceive the 
farmer and delight the audience ; the other which should 
present a gentleman acting the ploughboy, and every 
now and then overacting or forgetting the part, and 
always when alone, or with Mary, relapsing into his 
native manner. Now Charles Mathews misses both 
these. He is not at all like a ploughboy, nor like Sir 
Charles Coldstream acting the ploughboy. So little 
regard has he to truth, that he does not even remove the 
rings from his white fingers, although a jewelled hand is 
not usually seen directing a plough. Nor when the 
farmer is absent does the removal of such a constraint 
make any change in his voice and bearing. The situa- 



CHARLES MATHEWS. 69 

tions of this act are funny, and the amused spectators 
perhaps enjoy the broad contrast between the elegance 
of Sir Charles and the homeliness of the ploughboy; but 
an accomplished comedian like Charles Mathews ought 
to have seized such an opportunity of revealing the 
elegance and refined coolness of the man under the 
necessary coarseness of his assumed character. The 
alternations are just the sort of effects which one could 
fancy must be tempting to an artist conscious of his 
powers. It is, however, plain to anyone who is suffi- 
ciently critical to discriminate between the acting and the 
situation, that Charles Mathews has no distinct concep- 
tion in his mind of any character at all placed in this 
difficult situation, but that he abandons himself to the 
situation, and allows the fun of it to do his work. In 
other words, it is farce, not comedy : whereas the first 
act is comedy, and high comedy. 

As I did not see what the French critics wrote about 
his performance, I cannot say what effect this act had 
on them. And, indeed, as, according to my experience, 
the French critics usually confine their remarks to the 
general impression of a performance, and seldom analyse 
it, they may have contented themselves with eulogies. 



70 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

varied by allusions to Arnal, who created the part. Yet 
I am much mistaken if they also did not perceive the 
glaring discrepancy between the first and second acts ; 
and whatever Arnal may have done, I feel persuaded that 
Bouffe or Got (supposing them to have played the parts) 
could have made the second act quite as remarkable for 
its representation of character as the first act. 

After ' Used Up ' came the burlesque of ' The Golden 
Fleece/ with Compton delightfully humorous as the 
King, and Charles Mathews inimitably easy as the 
Chorus. Compton's burlesque seems to me in the very 
finest spirit of artistic drollery, and as unlike what is 
usually attempted, as true comedy is unlike efforts to be 
funny. I3ad actors seem to imagine that they have only 
to be extravagant to be burlesque ; as bad comedians 
think they have only to make grimaces to be comic. But 
Robson and Compton, guided by a true artistic sense, 
show that burlesque acting is the grotesque personation 
of a character, not the outrageous defiance of all charac- 
ter ; the personation has truth, although the character 
itself may be preposterously drawn. 

A similar remark may be made of the acting of 
Charles Mathews as the Chorus. He is assuredly not 






CHARLES MATHEWS. 71 

what would be called a burlesque actor in the ordinary 
acceptation of the term, nor would anyone familiar with 
his style suppose him capable of the heartiness and force 
usually demanded by burlesque ; and yet, because he is 
a fine actor, he is fine also in burlesque, giving a truthful 
and easy personation to an absurd conception. Another 
actor in such a part as Chorus, would have ' gagged ' or 
made grimaces, would have been extravagant and sought 
to startle the public into laughter at broad incongruities. 
Charles Mathews is as quiet, easy, elegant, as free from 
points and as delightfully humorous as if the part he 
played and the words he uttered belonged to high 
comedy ; he allows the incongruity of the character and 
the language to work their own laughable way, and he 
presents them with the gravity of one who believed them. 
Notice also the singular unobtrusiveness of his manner, 
even when the situation is most broadly sketched. For 
example, when the King interrupts his song by an appeal 
to Chorus, Charles Mathews steps forward, and, bending 
over the footlights with that quiet gravity which has 
hitherto marked his familiar explanations of what is going 
on, begins to sing fol de riddle lot. There is not one 
actor in a score who would not have spoiled the humour 



72 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

of this by a wink or grimace at the audience, as much as 
to say, ' Now I'm going to make you laugh.' The im- 
perturbable gravity and familiar ease of Mathews give a 
drollery to this ' fol de riddle lol ' which is indescribable. 
Probably few who saw Charles Mathews play the Chorus 
consider there was any art required so to play it ; they 
can understand that to sing patter songs as he sings them 
may not be easy, but to be quiet and graceful and 
humorous, to make every line tell, and yet never show 
the stress of effort, will not seem wonderful. If they 
could see another actor in the part it would open their 
eyes. 



FREDERIC LEMAITRE. 



CHAPTER VII. 

FREDERIC LEMAITRE. 

Among the few actors of exceptional genius who by 
reason of their very individuality defy classification, and. 
provoke the mOst contradictory judgments, must be 
placed the singularly gifted Frede'ric Lemaitre. Those who 
have only seen him in the pitiable decay of his later years 
cannot easily understand the enthusiasm he excited in his- 
prime ; but they will understand it, perhaps, if they re- 
flect that because he was an actor of genius, and not an 
actor of talent, he necessarily lost his hold of audiences 
when age and reckless habits had destroyed the personal 
qualifications which had been the sources of his triumph. 
There was always something offensive to good taste 
in Frederic's acting — a note of vulgarity, partly owing 
to his daring animal spirits, but mainly owing, I suspect,, 
to an innate vulgarity of nature. In his great moments 



74 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING, 

he was great ; but lie was seldom admirable throughout 
an entire scene, and never throughout an entire play. 
In his famous character of Robert Macaire the defects 
were scarcely felt, because the colossal buffoonery of that 
conception carried you at once into the region of hyper- 
bole and Aristophanic fun which soared beyond the 
range of criticism. It disgusted or subdued you at once. 
In every sense of the word it was a creation. A common 
melodrama without novelty or point became in his hands 
a grandiose symbolical caricature ; and Robert Macaire 
became a type, just as Lord Dundreary has become one 
in our own day. The costume he invented for that part 
was in itself a magnificent effrontery. It struck the key- 
note ; and as the piece proceeded all was felt to be in 
harmony with that picture of ideal blackguardism. For 
the peculiarity of Robert Macaire is the union of a 
certain ideal grace and bonhomie with the most degraded 
ruffianism and hardness, as of a nobleman preserving 
some of the instincts and habits of his class amid the 
instincts and habits of the galleys and the pothouse. 
If he danced, it was not until he had first pulled on 
a pair of hyperbolically tattered kid gloves ; and 
while waltzing with incomparable elegance he could 



FREDERIC LEMAITRE. 7$ 

not resist picking the pocket of his fair partner. He 
sang, took snuff, philosophised, and jested with an air of 
native superiority, and yet made you feel that he was a 
hateful scoundrel all the while. You laughed at his im- 
pudence, you admired his ease and readiness, and yet 
you would have killed him like a rat. He was jovial, 
graceful, false, and cruel. 

In Don Cesar de Bazan there was another and a 
very different portrait of the picturesque blackguard. 
Here also was the union of grace and tatters, of elegance 
and low habits. The Spanish nobleman had stained his 
ermine, and dragged his honour through the wineshop and 
the brothel ; but he had never wholly lost himself, and 
had not perverted his original nature. It was difficult to 
conceive anything more disreputable and debraille than this 
Don Cesar when he first appeared, tipsy and moralising 
on the fact that he had ' gambled with blackguards, who 
had cheated him like gentlemen.' There was immense 
exaggeration, but it was the exaggeration of great scene- 
painting. Very shortly you perceived the real nature 
of the man underneath — the nature stained, not spoiled, 
by reckless dissipation ; and it was therefore no surprise 
when, as the play proceeded, the nobler elements of this 



76 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING 

nature asserted themselves, and Don Cesar claimed 
respect. 

But although Frederic's performance of this part was 
in many respects incomparable, it had many serious 
defects. His love of ' gagging ' and his subordination of 
the scene to some particular effect were unpleasantly 
shown in that capital interview with the King, when his 
Majesty is discovered by Don Cesar in his wife's apart- 
ment. He quite spoiled by vulgarity the effect of his 
retort when the King, not knowing him, gives himself 
out as Don Ce'sar. ' Vous etes Don Ce'sar de Bazan ? 
Eh bien ! alors je suis le Roi d'Espagne.' He made it. 
very comical, but it was farcical and inartistic ; and the 
stupid appeal to the vulgarest laughter of the audience in 
the grotesquely extravagant feather which danced in his 
hat was suited to a pantomime or burlesque, but very un- 
suited to the serious situation of the drama. 

Very different was his acting in the prison scene, and 
especially noticeable was the rapid change from jovial 
conviviality over the wine cup to serious and dignified 
attention while the sentence of death was being passed 
on him. He stood with the napkin carelessly thrown 
over his arm, his hand lightly resting on one hip, and 



FREDERIC LEMAITRE. 77 

listened with grave calmness to the sentence ; at its con- 
clusion he relapsed into the convivial mood, exclaiming, 
' Troisieme couplet ! ' as he resumed his song ; and you 
felt the irony of his gravity, felt the unutterable levity of 
his nature. 

In pathos of a domestic kind, and in outbursts of 
passion, Lemaitre was singularly affecting. When he 
played in ' Paillasse,' ' Trente Ans de la Vie d'un Joueur,' 
and 'La Dame de St. Tropez/ he left indelible impressions 
of pathos and of lurid power ; but I must confess that I 
not only thought very little of his ' Ruy Bias/ but always 
doubted whether his style of acting were not essentially 
unsuited to the poetic drama. He seemed to feel him- 
self ill at ease, walking upon stilts. His expressions 
were conventional, and his gestures vehement and often 
common. As the lackey he was ignoble ; as the minister 
and lover his declamation was, to my thinking, cold and 
unimpassioned in its violence. This, however, was not 
the opinion of M. Victor Hugo, who, as a Frenchman 
and the author of the play, may be supposed to be a 
better judge than I am, and in fairness I will quote what 
he says in the appendix to his play : — ' Quant a. M. 
Frederic Lemaitre, qu'en dire? Les acclamations 



78 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



enthousiastes de la foule le saississent a son entree en 
scene [rather premature enthusiasm] et le suivent jus- 
qu'apres le denouement. Reveur et profond au premier 
acte, melancolique au deuxieme, grand, passionne, et 
sublime au troisieme, il s'eleve au cinquieme a Tun de 
ses prodigieux effets tragiques du haut desquels l'acteur 
rayonnant domine tous les souvenirs de son art. Pour 
les vieillards c'est Lekain et Garrick meles dans un seul 
homme ; pour nous c'est Taction de Kean combinee avec 
l'emotion de Talma. Et puis, partout, a travers les 
eclairs eblouissants de son jeu, M. Frederic a des larmes, 
de ces vraies larmes qui font pleurer les autres, de ces 
larmes dont parle Horace : si vis meflere dolendum est 
primum ipsi ' tibi.' 

In answer to such a dithyramb as this I can only 
appeal to the recollections of those readers who have seen 
Frederic play Ruy Bias. For myself I confess to have 
the smallest possible pleasure in a French actor when he 
is ' profond et reveur ; ' [and that not only did I detect- 
no tears in Frederic's Ruy Bias, but his sublime tragic 
effects — what the French critics call ' ses explosions ' — 
left me wholly unmoved. Indeed, to speak of Lemaitre 
as a rival of Kean or Rachel seems to me like comparing 



FREDERIC LEMAITRE. 79 

Eugene Sue with Victor Hugo — the gulf that separates 
prose from poetry yawns between them. 

Lemaitre was very handsome. He had a wonderful 
eye, with large orbit, a delicate and sensitive mouth, a 
fine nose, a bold jaw, a figure singularly graceful, and a 
voice penetrating and sympathetic. He had great animal 
spirits, great daring, great fancy, and great energy of 
animal passion. He always created his parts — that is to 
say, gave them a specific stamp of individuality ; and 
the creative activity of his imagination was seen in a 
hundred novel details. But as his physical powers 
decayed his acting became less and less effective ; for in 
losing the personal charm, it had no stage traditions to 
fall back upon. And the last time I saw him, which 
must be fourteen or fifteen years ago, he was rapidly 
degenerating ; every now and then a flash of the old fire 
would be visible, but the effects were vanishing and the 
defects increasing. An interesting letter which recently 
appeared in the 'Pall Mall Gazette ' gave a graphic account 
of this great actor in the last stages of his ruin. I should 
be sorry to see the man who had once swayed audiences 
with irresistible power reduced to the painful feebleness, 
which this correspondent describes. 



So ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE TWO KEELEYS. 

Among my very pleasantest recollections of the stage 
arise the figures of Keeley and his wife, each standing 
alone as a type of comic acting, and each markedly illus- 
trating the truth so little understood, that acting, because 
it is a representative art, cannot be created by intelligence 
or sensibility (however necessary these may be for the 
perfection of the art), but must always depend upon the 
physical qualifications of the actor, these being the means 
of representation. It matters little what the actor feels ; 
what he can express gives him his distinctive value. 

Keeley was undoubtedly equipped with unusual ad- 
vantages, over and above his intelligence. His hand- 
some, pleasant features set in a large fat face, his beetling 
brow and twinkling eye, his rotund little body, neither 
ungraceful nor inactive, at once prepossessed the spec- 
tator j and his unctuous voice and laugh completed the 



THE TWO KEELEYS. 



conquest. He was drollery personified ; drollery with- 
out caricature, drollery without ugliness, drollery that 
had an arriere fie?isee of cleverness, and nothing of harsh- 
ness or extravagance. To define him by a comparison^ 
he was a duodecimo Falstaff. 

Mrs. Keeley had little or none of the unctuousness of 
her husband, but she also was remarkably endowed. 
She was as intense and pointed as he was easy and fluent. 
She concentrated into her repartees an amount of intel- 
lectual vis and ' devil ' which gave such a feather to the 
shaft that authors must often have been surprised at the 
revelation to themselves of the force of their own wit. 
Eye, voice, gesture sparkled and chuckled. You could 
see that she enjoyed the joke, but enjoyed it rather as 
an intellectual triumph over others, than (as in Keeley's 
case) from an impersonal delight in the joke itself. 
Keeley was like a fat, happy, self-satisfied puppy, taking 
life easily, ready to get sniffing and enjoyment out of 
everything. Mrs. Keeley was like a sprightly kitten, 
eager to make a mouse of every moving thing. 

The humorous predominated in Keeley ; in his wife 
the predominant mood was self-assertion: so that the 
one was naturally the comic servant, the other the pert 

G 



82 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

soubrette. The one took kindly to his vices ; he was a 
glutton, a liar, a coward, was kicked and bullied, and 
bemoaned his lot without ever forfeiting our good-will. 
He never made a pretence of virtue ; he threw all his 
vices on his organisation — if blame had to be pronounced 
Nature must bear it. He was never despicable ; even in 
the moments of abject terror (and no one could represent 
comic terror better than he did) somehow or other he 
contrived to make you feel that courage ought not to be 
expected of him, for cowardice was simply the natural 
trembling of that human jelly. He lied with a grace 
which made it a sort of truth — a personal and private 
truth. He chuckled over his sensuality in such an un- 
-suspiciousness of moral candour, and with such an in- 
tensity of relish, that you almost envied his gulosity. He 
was, in fact, a great idealist. 

When people foolishly objected that he was 'always 
Keeley,' they forgot in the first place that an actor with 
•so peculiar an organisation could not disguise his indi- 
viduality ; and in the second place, that, in spite of the 
familiar face, voice, and manner which necessarily reap- 
peared under all disguises, the representative power of 
the actor did really display itself in very various types. 



THE TWO KEELEYS. 83 

Keeley played many parts, and played them variously. 
No one who had seen his Sir Andrew Aguecheek could 
detect in it traces of Waddilove (in ' To Parents and 
Guardians ') ; no one who had laughed at his Acres could 
recognise it in ' Two o'Clock in the Morning ; ' no 
one who had enjoyed his terror in ' A Thumping Legacy' 
could recognise the same type in ' Box and Cox.' In 
fact, the range of his creations was unusually wide, and I 
do not remember to have seen him absolutely fail to 
represent the character, except in the single instance of 
Sir Hugh Evans, a part from which he was intellectually 
and physically excluded — the irritable, irascible, lean, 
pedantic Welsh parson being the very last kind of 
character which his representative powers could express. 

It was not said of Mrs. Keeley that she was ' always 
Mrs. Keeley,' although in truth her strongly marked 
peculiarities were quite incapable of disguise ; but she 
laid hold of some characteristic in the part she was play- 
ing, and rendered it with such sharpness of outline and 
such force of effect that her own individuality was lost 
sight of to the uncritical eye. Her physique was also 
more flexible than that of her husband, and she could 
i make up ' better. Her perception of characteristics 



84 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

(within a certain range) was very acute : and sometimes 
she presented a character with extraordinary felicity. 
Did the reader happen to see her play the maid of all 
work in ' Furnished Apartments ' ? He will not easily 
forget such a picture of the London ' slavey/ a stupid, 
wearied, slatternly good-natured dab, her brain confused 
by incessant bells, her vitality ebbing under overwork. 
He will not forget the dazed expression, the limp ex- 
haustion of her limbs, or the wonderful assemblage of 
rags which passed for her costume. There was some- 
thing at once inexpressibly droll and pathetic in this 
picture. It was so grotesque, yet so real, that laughter 
ended in a sigh. 

In quite a different style was her performance of Bob 
Nettles (in ' To Parents and Guardians '), the only repre- 
sentation of a masculine character by a woman that I re- 
member to have seen with perfect satisfaction. She was 
the schoolboy in every look and gesture. 

It should be noted that whereas Keeley was eminently 
an idealist, and as capable of personating characters in 
high and poetic comedy as in broad farce, Mrs. Keeley 
was eminently a realist, and her realism was always a dis- 
turbing tendency in poetic comedy. To see the two as 



THE TWO KEELEYS. 85 

Audrey and Touchstone was indeed to see acting the 
like of which has rarely been seen since ; but her Audrey, 
though mirth-provoking, belonged altogether to another 
region of art than that of Keeley's Touchstone. In the 
first place, it was unpoetic ; in the second place, it was 
defective in that the stupidity was conscious stupidity — 
the mask of a sharp, keen face, not the stolidity of a 
country wench. When Keeley played Sir Andrew 
Aguecheek you had no suspicion of a keen, clear intel- 
lect lurking behind that fatuity ; you felt that beef does 
harm the wit, and that he had been a great eater of beef. 
But when Mrs. Keeley's Audrey asks, ' What is poetry ? 
is it a true thing ? ' you heard in her accent, and saw in 
her eye, that she knew more about the matter than 
Touchstone himself. 

Keeley could play a gentleman * Mrs. Keeley could 
never rise above the servants' hall. But, on the other 
hand, Mrs. Keeley had a power over the more energetic 
passions which he wanted \ she was an excellent melo- 
dramatic actress, and her pathos drew tears. 

In Jerrold's capital little piece, ' The Prisoners of 
War,' Keeley and his wife were seen to great advantage. 
As the vulgar, bragging Englishman, despising French- 



86 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

men and everything French because it was not Cockney* 
his idealism preserved the real comedy of the type from 
degenerating into gross caricature or unpleasant truth- 
fulness. One recognised the national failing ; but one 
liked the good-natured Briton. To hear him haughtily 
wave aside the objection to the taxes in England : 'Taxes \ 
We haven't the word in our language. There are two or 
three duties to be sure ' (this was said with a mild can- 
dour, admitting what could not be of the slightest conse- 
quence) ; ' but ' (and here the buoyant confidence of 
superiority once more reappeared in his accent) ' with us 
duties are pleasures.' (And then following up with a 
hyperbole of assurance) ' As for taxes, you'd make an 
Englishman stare only to mention such things.' Not 
less amusing was his defence when reproached for this 
bragging :— 

Pall Mall. — As a sailor, isn't it your duty to die for your 
country ? 

Firebrace. — Most certainly. 

Pall Mall. — As a civiliati it is mine to lie for her. Courage isn't 
confined to fighting. No, no ; whenever a Frenchman throws me 
down a lie, for the honour of England I always trump it. 

The convincing logic of this used to set the house in a 
roar. But it was his manner which gave the joke its 



THE TWO KEELEYS. 87 

; and when he vindicated the superiority of the 
air of England over the air of France, on the ground that 
' it goes twice as far — it's twice as thick/ the pit screamed 
with delight. Mrs. Keeley as Polly Pall Mall . had an 
inferior part, but by her make up, and, above all, by the 
inimitable manner in which she read a letter interrupted 
by sobs, she raised the part into first-rate importance. 

It is an inestimable loss our stage has suffered by the 
departure of two such actors. Keeley was equally at 
home in broad farce, high comedy, and ideal scenes, 
always an idealist, always true, always humorous. Mrs. 
Keeley was great in farce, low comedy, and melodrama;, 
pathetic and humorous, and always closely imitative of 
daily life. Their career was one uninterrupted triumph, 
and they live in the memory of playgoers with a halo of 
personal affection round their heads. 



88 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



CHAPTER IX. 

SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 

Shakspeare was most probably an indifferent actor. 
If a doubt is permissible on this point, there is none re- 
specting his mastery as a critic. He may not have been 
a brilliant executant ; he was certainly a penetrating and 
reflective connoisseur. 

Modern idolaters, who cannot see faults in Shak- 
speare's plays which are still before us, and which to un- 
biassed eyes present defects both numerous and glaring, 
may perhaps consider it an impertinence to infer any 
defects in his acting, which is not before us, which has 
long ceased to be remembered, and which never seems 
to have been much spoken of. Why not with a generous 
enthusiasm assume that it was fine ? Why not suppose 
that the creator of so many living, breathing characters 
must have been also a noble personator ? There is 
nothing to prevent the generous admirer indulging in this 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 89 

hypothesis if he finds comfort in it. I merely remark 
that it has no evidence in its favour ; and a great many 
points against it. The mere fact that we hear nothing of 
his qualities as an actor implies that there was nothing 
above the line, nothing memorable, to be spoken of. We 
hear of him as wit and companion, as poet and man of 
business, but not a word of his qualities as an actor. Of 
Burbage, Alleyn, Tarleton, Knell, Bentley, Miles, Wilson, 
Crosse, Pope, and others, we hear more or less ; but all 
that tradition vaguely wafts to us of Shakspeare is, that 
he played the Ghost in ' Hamlet,' and Old Knowell in 
' Every Man in his Humour,' neither of them parts which 
demand or admit various excellences. 

Like many other dramatists of the early time — Mun- 
day, Chettle, Lodge, Kyd, Nash, Ben Jonson, Heywood, 
Dekker, and Rowley — he adopted sock and buskin as a 
means of making money ; and it is probable that, like 
actors of all times, he had , a favourable opinion of his 
own performances. He certainly was able to see through 
the tricks and devices with which • more popular players 
captivated ' the groundlings,' and was doubtless one of 
the ' judicious ' whom these devices grieved. But in 
spite of his marvellous genius, in spite of the large flexi- 



90 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

bility of mind which could enable him to conceive great 
varieties of character, it is highly probable that he wanted 
the mimetic flexibility of organisation which 'could alone 
have enabled him to personate what he conceived. The 
powers of conception and the powers of presentation are 
distinct. A poet is rarely a good reader of his own 
verse, and has never yet been a great personator of his. 
own characters. Shakspeare doubtless knew— none 
knew so well — how Hamlet, Othello, Richard, and Fal- 
staff should be personated ; but had he been called upon 
to personate them he would have found himself wanting 
in voice, face, and temperament. The delicate sensitive- 
ness of his organisation, which is implied in the exquisite- 
ness and flexibility of his genius, would absolutely have 
unfitted him for the presentation of characters demanding 
a robust vigour and a weighty animalism. It is a vain 
attempt to paint frescoes with a camel's hair brush. The 
broad and massive effects necessary to scenic presentation 
could never have been produced by such a temperament 
as his. Thus even on the supposition of his having been 
a good drawing-room mime, he would have wanted the 
qualities of a good actor. And we have no ground for 
inferring that he was even a good drawing-room mime. 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 91 

I dare say he declaimed finely, as far as rhythmic 
"cadence and a nice accentuation went. But his non- 
success implies that his voice was intractable, or limited 
in its range. Without a sympathetic voice, no declama- 
tion can be effective. The tones which stir us need not 
be musical, need not be pleasant even, but they must 
have a penetrating, vibrating quality. Had Shakspeare 
possessed such a voice he would have been famous as an 
actor. Without it all his other gifts were as nothing 011 
the stage. Had he seen Garrick, Kemble, or Kean per- 
forming in plays not his own he might doubtless have 
perceived a thousand deficiencies in their conception,, 
and defects in their execution ; but had he appeared on. 
the same stage with them, even in plays of his own, the 
audiences would have seen the wide gulf between con- 
ception and presentation. One lurid look, one pathetic 
intonation, would have more power in swaying the 
emotions of the audience than all the subtle and pro- 
found passion which agitated the soul of the poet, but did 
not manifestly express itself: the look and the tone may 
come from a man so drunk as to be scarcely able to> 
stand ; but the public sees only the look, hears only 
the tone, and is irresistibly moved by these intelligible, 
symbols. 



92 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

That Shakspeare, as a critic, had mastered the I 
principles of the art of acting is apparent from the brief 
but pregnant advice to the players in * Hamlet.' He ; 
first insists on the necessity of a flexible elocution. He 
gives no rules for the management of voice and accent ; 
but in his emphatic warning against the common error of 
' mouthing,' and his request to have the speech spoken 
' trippingly on the tongue/ it is easy to perceive what he 
means. The word ' trippingly,' to modern ears, is not 
perhaps felicitously descriptive ; but the context shows 
that it indicates easy naturalness as opposed to artificial 
mouthing. It is further enforced by the advice as to 
gesture : ' Do not saw the air too much with your hand, 
but use all gently.' 

After the management of the voice, actors most err in 
the management of the body : they mouth their sentences, 
and emphasise their gestures, in the effort to be effective, 
and in ignorance of the psychological conditions on 
which effects depend. Id each case the effort to 
aggrandise natural expression leads to exaggeration and 
want of truth. In attempting the Ideal they pass into 
the Artificial. The tones and gestures of ordinary unim- 
passioned moments would not, they feel, be appropriate 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 93 

to ideal characters and impassioned situations ; and the 
difficulty of the art lies precisely in the selection of 
idealised expressions which shall, to the spectator, be 
symbols of real emotions. All but very great actors are 
redundant in gesticulation; not simply overdoing the 
significant, but unable to repress insignificant movements. 
Shakspeare must have daily seen this ; and therefore he 
bids the actor ' suit the action to the word with this 
special observance, that you overstep not the modesty of 
nature ; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of 
playing, whose end, both at first and now, was and is, to 
hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature.' 

It would be worth the actor's while to borrow a hint 
from the story of Voltaire's pupil, when, to repress her 
tendency towards exuberant gesticulation, he ordered her 
to rehearse with her hands tied to her side. She began 
her recitation in this enforced quietness, but at last, 
carried away by the movement of her feelings, she flung 
up her arms, and snapped the threads. In tremor she 
began to apologise to the poet ; he smilingly reassured 
her that the gesticulation was then admirable, because it 
was irrepressible. If actors will study fine models they 
will learn that gestures, to be effective, must be signifi- 



•94 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

cant, and to be significant they must be rare. To stand 
still on the stage (and not appear a guy) is one of the 
-elementary difficulties of the art — and one which is rarely 
mastered. 

Having indicated his views on declamation, Shak- 
speare proceeds to utter golden advice on expression. 
He specially warns the actor against both over-vehe- 
mence and coldness. Remembering that the actor is an 
aftist, he insists on the observance of that cardinal 
principle in all art, the subordination of impulse to law, 
the regulation of all effects with a view to beauty. ' In 
the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind 
of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance 
that may give it smoothness. O ! it offends me to the 
soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a 
passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the 
groundlings.' What is this but a recognition of the 
mastery of art, by which the ruling and creating intellect 
makes use of passionate symbols, and subordinates them 
to a pleasurable end? If the actor were really in a 
passion his voice would be a scream, his gestures wild 
and disorderly ; he would present a painful, not an 
aesthetic spectacle. He must therefore select from out 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 95 

the variety of passionate expressions only those that can 
b>e harmoniously subordinated to a general whole. He 
must be at once passionate and temperate : trembling 
with emotion, yet with a mind in vigilant supremacy 
controlling expression, directing every intonation, look, 
and gesture. The rarity of fine acting depends on the 
•difficulty there is in being at one and the same moment 
■so deeply moved that the emotion shall spontaneously 
express itself in symbols universally intelligible, and yet 
so calm as to be perfect master of effects, capable of 
modulating voice and moderating gesture when they 
tend to excess or ugliness. 

'To preserve this medium between mouthing and 
meaning too little,' says Colley Cibber, ' to keep the 
attention more pleasingly awake by a tempered spirit 
than by mere vehemence of voice, is of all the master 
strokes of an actor the most difficult to reach.' Some 
critics, annoyed by rant, complain of the ranter being 
' too fiery.' As Lessing says, an actor cannot have too 
much fire, but he may easily have too little sense. 
Vehemence without real emotion is rant ; vehemence 
with real emotion, but without art, is turbulence. To be 
loud and exaggerated is the easy resource of actors , who 



9 5 ON ACTORS AND 2 HE ART OF ACTING 

have no faculty ; to be vehement and agitated is to 
betray the inexperience of one who has not yet mastered 
the art. ' Be not too tame neither/ Shakspeare quickly 
adds, lest his advice should be misunderstood, ' but let 
your own discretion be your tutor.' Yes ; the actor's 
discretion must tell him when he has hit upon the right 
tone and right expression, which must first be suggested 
to him by his own feelings. In endeavouring to express 
emotions, he will try various tones, various gestures, 
various accelerations and retardations of the rhythm; and 
during this tentative process his vigilant discretion will 
arrest those that are effective, and discard the rest. 

It is because few actors are sufficiently reflective tha t 
good acting is so rare ; and the tameness of a few who 
are reflective, but not passionate, brings discredit on 
reflection. Such study as actors mostly give is to imita- 
tion of others, rather than to introspection of their own 
means; and this is fatal to excellence. ' Nous devons 
etre sensibles,' said Talma once ; ' nous devons eprouver 
l'emotion ; mais pour mieux l'imiter, pour mieux en 
saisir les caracteres par l'e'tude et la ^flexion.' 

The anecdotes about Macready and Liston given on 
page 38 suggest a topic of some interest in relation to the 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 97 

art of acting : In how far does the actor feel the emotion 
he expresses ? When we hear of Macready and Liston 
lashing themselves into a fury behind the scenes in order 
to come on the stage sufficiently excited to give a truthful 
representation of the agitations of anger, the natural infer- 
ence is that these artists recognised the truth of the popu- 
lar notion which assumes that the actor really feels what 
he expresses. But this inference seems contradicted by ex- 
perience. Not only is it notorious that the actor is feigning,. 
and that if he really felt what he feigns he would be unable 
to withstand the wear and tear of such emotion repeated 
night after night ; but it is indisputable, to those who know 
anything of art, that the mere presence of genuine emotion' 
would be such a disturbance of the intellectual equilibrium 
as entirely to frustrate artistic expression. Talma told 
M. Barriere that he was once carried away by the truth 
and beauty of the actress playing with him till she re- 
called him by a whisper : ' Take care, Talma, you are 
moved ! ' on which he remarked, ' C'est qu'en effet de 
demotion nait le trouble : la voix resiste, la memoire 
manque, les gestes sont faux, l'effet est detruit ; ' and 
there is an observation of Mole to a similar effect : ' Je 
ne suis pas content de moi ce soir • je me suis trop livreV 

H 



98 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

je ne suis pas reste mon maitre : j'etais entre trop vive- 
ment dans la situation j j'etais le personnage meme, je 
n'etais plus l'acteur qui le joue. J'ai ete vrai comme je 
le serais chez moi ; pour Foptique du theatre il faut Vetre 
autrement? 

Everyone initiated into the secrets of the art of acting 
will seize at once the meaning of this luminous phrase 
roptique du theatre; and the unitiated will understand 
liow entirely opposed to all the purposes of art and all 
the secrets of effect would be the representation of 
passion in its real rather than in its symbolical expression : 
the red, swollen, and distorted features of grief, the harsh 
and screaming intonation of anger, are unsuited to art ; 
the paralysis of all outward expression and the flurry and 
agitation of ungraceful gesticulation which belong to 
certain powerful emotions, may be described by the poet, 
but cannot be admitted into plastic art. The poet may 
tell us what is signified by the withdrawal of all life and 
movement from the face and limbs, describing the internal 
agitations, or the deadly calm which disturb or paralyse 
the sufferer; but the painter, sculptor, or actor must tell 
us what the sufferer undergoes, and tell it through the 
symbols of outward expression — the internal workings 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 99 

must be legible in the external symbols ; and these ex- 
ternal symbols must also have a certain grace and pro- 
portion to affect us aesthetically. 

All art is symbolical. If it presented emotion in its 
real expression it would cease to move us as art ; 
sometimes cease to move us at all, or move us only to 
laughter. There is a departure from reality in all the stage- 
accessories. The situation, the character, the language, 
all are at variance with daily experience. Emotion does 
not utter itself in verse nor in carefully chosen sentences ; 
and to speak verse with the negligence of prose is a 
serious fault. There is a good passage in Colley Cibber's 
account of Betterton, which actors, and critics who are 
not alive to the immense effects that lie in fine elocution, 
would do well to ponder on. ' In the just delivery of 
poetical numbers, particularly where the sentiments are 
pathetic, it is scarce credible upon how minute an article 
of sound depends their greatest beauty or inafTection. 
The voice of a singer is not more strictly ty'd to Time 
and Tune, than that of an actor in theatrical elocution. 
The least syllable too long, or too slightly dwelt upon in 
a period, depreciates it to nothing ; which very syllable, 
if rightly touched, shall, like the heightening stroke of 



ioo ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

light from a master's pencil, give life and spirit to the 
whole.' It is superfluous to insist on the utter impossi- 
bility of attending to such delicate minutiae if the speaker 
be really agitated by emotion. A similar remark applies 
to all the other details of his art. His looks and gestures, 
his position in the picture, all will be out of proportion 
and fail of their due effect unless he is master of himself. 

The reader sees at once that as a matter of fact the 
emotions represented by the actor are not agitating him 
as they would agitate him in reality ; he is feigning, and 
we know that he is feigning ; he is representing a fiction 
which is to move us as a fiction, and not to lacerate our 
sympathies as they wquM be lacerated by the agony of a 
fellow-creature actually suffering in our presence. The 
tears we shed are tears welling from a sympathetic 
source ; but their salt bitterness is removed, and their 
pain is pleasurable. 

But now arises the antinomy, as Kant would call it — 
the contradiction which perplexes judgment. If the actor 
lose all power over his art under the disturbing influence 
of emotion, he also loses all power over his art in pro- 
portion to his deadness to emotion. If he really feel, he 
cannot act ; but he cannot act unless he feel. All the 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 101 

absurd efforts of mouthing and grimacing actors to pro- 
duce an effect, all the wearisomeness of cold conventional 
representation — mimicry without life — we know to be 
owing to the unimpassioned talent of the actor. Observe, 
I do not say to his unimpassioned nature. It is quite 
possible for a man of exquisite sensibility to be ludi- 
crously tame in his acting, if he has not the requisite 
talent of expression, or has not yet learned how to modu- 
late it so as to give it due effect. The other day in 
. noticing the rare ability of Mdle. Lucca in depicting the 
emotions of Margaret in ' Faust,' I had occasion to, 
remark on the surprising transformation which had taken 
place in two years, changing her from a feeble conven- 
tional ineffective actress, into a passionate, subtle, and 
original artist. In the practice of two years she had 
learned the secrets of expression ; she had learned to 
modulate j and having learnt this, having felt her way, 
she could venture to give play to the suggestions of her 
impulses, which before that had doubtless alarmed 
her. But although it is quite possible for an actor to 
have sensibility without the talent of expression, and 
therefore to be a tame actor though an impassioned 
man, it is wholly impossible for him to express what he 



102 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

has never felt, to be an impassioned actor with a cold 
nature. 

And here is the point of intersection of the two lines 
of argument just followed out. The condition being 
that a man must feel emotion if he is to express it, for 
if he does not feel it he will not know how to express it, 
how can this be reconciled with the impossibility of his 
affecting us aesthetically while he is disturbed by emotion ? 
In other words : how far does he really feel the passion 
he expresses ? It is a question of degree. As in all art, 
feeling lies at the root, but the foliage and flowers, 
though deriving their sap from emotion, derive their form 
and structure from the intellect. The poet cannot write 
while his eyes are full of tears, while his nerves are 
trembling from the mental shock, and his hurrying 
thoughts are too agitated to settle into definite tracks. 
But he must have felt, or his verse will be a mere echo. 
It is from the memory of past feelings that he draws the 
beautiful image with which he delights us. He is tremu- 
lous again under the remembered agitation, but it is a 
pleasant tremor, and in no way disturbs the clearness of 
his intellect. He is a spectator of his own tumult ; and 
though moved by it, can yet so master it as to select 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 103 

from it only these elements which suit his purpose. We 
are all spectators of ourselves ; but it is the peculiarity of 
the artistic nature to indulge in such introspection even 
in moments of all but the most disturbing passion, and to< 
draw thence materials for art. This is true also of the 
fine actor, and many of my readers will recognise the 
truth of what Talma said of himself : — ' I have suffered 
cruel losses, and have often been assailed with profound 
sorrows ; but after the first moment when grief vents 
itself in cries and tears, I have found myself involuntarily 
turning my gaze inwards ('je faisais un retour sur mes 
souffrances '), and found that the actor was unconsciously 
studying the man, and catching nature in the act.' It is 
only by thus familiarising oneself with the nature of the 
various emotions, that one can properly interpret them. 
But even that is not enough. They must be watched in 
others, the interpreting key being given in our own con- 
sciousness. Having something like an intellectual appre- 
ciation of the sequences of feeling and their modes of 
manifestation, the actor has next to select out of these 
such as his own physical qualifications enable him to re- 
produce effectively, and such as will be universally in- 
telligible. To quote Talma once more : — ' Oui, nous 



io4 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

devons etre sensibles, nous devons eprouver 1' emotion ; 
mais pour mieux l'imiter, pour mieux en saisir les carac- 
teres par Tetude et la reflexion. Notre art en exige de 
profonds. Point d'improvisation possible sur la scene 
sous peine d'echec. Tout est calcule, tout doit etre prevu, et 
Femotion qui semble soudaine, et le trouble qui parait invo- 
lontaire. L'intonation, le geste, le regard qui semblent 
inspires, ont ete repetes cent fois.' 

All this I may assume the reader to accept without 
dissent, and yet anticipate his feeling some perplexity in 
reconciling it with the anecdotes which started this digres- 
sion. Surely, he may say, neither Macready nor Liston 
could have been so unfamiliar with rage and its mani- 
festations that any hesitation could paralyse their efforts 
to express these. Why then this preparation behind the 
scenes? Simply because it was absolutely necessary 
that they should be in a state of excitement if they were 
to represent it with truthfulness ; and having tempera- 
ments which were not instantaneously excitable by the 
mere imagination of a scene, they prepared themselves. 
Actors like Edmund Kean, Rachel, or Lemaitre found 
no difficulty in the most rapid transitions ; they could 
one moment chat calmly and the next explode. The 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AND CRITIC. 105 

imaginative sympathy instantaneously called up all the 
accessories of expression ; one tone would send vibra- 
tions through them powerful enough to excite the nervous 
discharge. 

The answer to the question, How far does the actor 
feel ? is, therefore, something like this : He is in a state 
of emotional excitement sufficiently strong to furnish him 
with the elements of expression, but not strong enough 
to disturb his consciousness of the fact that he is only 
imagining — sufficiently strong to give the requisite tone 
to his voice and aspect to his features, but not strong 
enough to prevent his modulating the one and arranging 
the other according to a preconceived standard. His 
passion must be ideal — sympathetic, not personal. He 
may hate with a rival's hate the actress to whom he is 
manifesting tenderness, or love with a husband's love the 
actress to whom he is expressing vindictiveness ; but for 
Juliet or Desdemona he must feel love and wrath. One 
day Malibran upbraiding Templeton for his coldness 
towards her in the love scenes of ' La Sonnambula,' 
asked him if he were not married, and told him to 
imagine that she was his wife. The stupid tenor, entirely 
misunderstanding her, began to be superfluously tender 



106 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

at rehearsal, whereupon she playfully recalled to him that 
it was during the performance he was to imagine her to 
be Mrs. Templeton — at rehearsal, Mdme. Malibran. 

We sometimes hear amateur critics object to fine 
actors that they are every night the same, never varying 
their gestures or their tones. This is stigmatised as 
' mechanical ' ; and the critics innocently oppose to it 
some ideal of their own which they call ' inspiration.' 
Actors would smile at such nonsense. What is called 
inspiration is the mere haphazard of carelessness or 
incompetence ; the actor is seeking an expression which 
he ought to have found when studying his part. What 
would be thought of a singer who sang his aria differently 
every night? In the management of his breath, in the 
distribution of light and shade, in his phrasing, the singer 
who knows how to sing never varies. The timbre of his 
voice, the energy of his spirit, may vary ; but his methods 
are invariable. Actors learn their parts as singers learn 
their songs. Every detail is deliberative, or has been 
deliberated. The very separation of Art from Nature in- 
volves this calculation. The sudden flash of suggestion 
which is called inspiration may be valuable, it may be 
worthless : the artistic intellect estimates the value, and 
adopts or rejects it accordingly. 



SHAKSPEARE AS ACTOR AXD CRITIC. 107 

Trusting to the inspiration of the moment is like 
trusting to a shipwreck for your first lesson in swimming.. 

A greater master of the art, practical and theoretical, 

as actor and teacher, the late M. Sanson, of the Theatre 

Francais, has well said : 

Meditez, reglez tout, essay ez tout d/avance : 
Un assidu travail donne la confiance. 
L'aisance est du talent le plus aimable attrait : 
Un jeu bien prepare notes semble sans appret. 

And elsewhere : 

Mais, en s'abandonnant, que 1' artiste s'observe ; 
De vos heureux hasards sachez vous souvenir : 
Ce qu'il n'a pas produit, l'art doit le retenir, 
L'acteur qui du talent veut atteindre le faite, 
Quand il livre son ceeur doit conserver sa tete. ' 

Shakspeare, who had learned this in his experience as 
a dramatist, saw that it was equally true of dramatic re- 
presentation. The want of calculation in actors distressed 
him. He saw the public applauding players ' who having 
neither the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, 
pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed - that they 
seemed the products of nature's journeymen. He saw 
them mistaking violence for passion, turbulence for art, 

1 L'Art Thedtral, Chant I. Every studious actor should medi- ' 
tate the counsels of this excellent work. 



ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



and he bade them remember the purpose of playing, 
which was to hold the mirror up to nature. 

Besides these cardinal directions, Shakspeare gives 
another which is of minor importance, though it points at 
a real evil. Avoid gag, he says. It will make some 
barren spectators laugh, but it shows a pitiful ambition. 
This, however, is a fault which the audience can correct 
if it please. Generally audiences are so willing to have 
their laughter excited as to be indifferent to the means 
employed. Gagging, therefore, is, always was, and always 
will be popular. I merely allude to it to show how com- 
plete is Shakspeare's advice to the players, and how 
seriously he had considered the whole subject of acting. 



ON NATURAL ACTING. 109 



:f 



CHAPTER X. 

ON NATURAL ACTING. 



It has commonly been held to be a dexterous and delicate 
compliment to Garrick's acting that Fielding has paid 
through the humorous criticisms of Partridge, who saw no- 
thing admirable in * the terror of the little man,' but thought 
J the actor who played the king was deserving of great 
C/} praise. ' He speaks all his words distinctly, half as loud 
again as the other. Anybody may see he is an actor.' 
I cannot say what truth there was in Partridge's appre- 
ciation of Garrick, but if his language is to be inter- 
preted as Fielding seems to imply, the intended compli- 
ment is a sarcasm. Partridge says, with a contemptuous 
sneer, ' He the best player ! Why, I could act as well as. 
he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should 
have looked in the very same manner, and done just as- 
he did.' 

Now assuming this to be tolerably near the truth, it 



no ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

implies that Garrick's acting was what is called ''natural;' 
b>ut not the natural presentation of a Hamlet. The 
melancholy sceptical prince in the presence of his father's 
ghost must have felt a tremulous and solemn awe, but can- 
not have felt the vulgar terror of a vulgar nature ; yet Part- 
ridge says, ' If that little man upon the stage is not fright- 
ened, I never saw any man frightened in my life.' The 
manner of a frightened Partridge can never have been at 
all like the manner of Hamlet. Let us turn to Colley 
Cibber's remarks on Betterton, if we would see how a great 
actor represented the emotion : ' You have seen a Hamlet, 
perhaps, who on the first appearance of his father's spirit 
has thrown himself into all the straining vociferation 
requisite to express rage and fury, and the house has 
thundered with applause, though the misguided actor 
w r as all the while tearing a passion into rags. I am the 
more bold to offer you this particular instance because 
the late Mr. Addison, while I sate by him to see this 
scene acted, made the same observation, asking me, with 
some surprise, if I thought Hamlet should be in so violent 
a passion with the ghost, which, though it might have 
astonished, it had not provoked him. For you may ob- 
serve that in this beautiful speech the passion never rises 



ON NATURAL ACTING. nr 

beyond an almost breathless astonishment, or an im- 
patience limited by filial reverence to enquire into the 
suspected wrongs that may have raised him from his 
peaceful tomb, and a desire to know what a spirit so 
seemingly distressed might wish or enjoin a sorrowful 
son to execute towards his future quiet in the grave. 
This was the light into which Betterton threw this scene ; 
which he opened with a pause of mute amazement, then 
slowly rising to a solemn trembling voice he made the 
ghost equally terrible to the spectator as to himself. 
And in the descriptive part of the natural emotions which 
the ghastly visions gave him, the boldness of his expostu- 
lation was still governed by decency, manly but not 
"braving ; his voice never rising to that seeming outrage or 
wild defiance of what he naturally revered. But, alas ! to 
preserve this medium between mouthing and meaning 
too little, to keep the attention more pleasingly awake by 
a tempered spirit than by mere vehemence of voice, is of 
-all the master-strokes of an actor the most difficult to 
reach.' 

It is obvious that the naturalness required from 
Hamlet is very different from the naturalness of a 
Partridge ; and Fielding made a great mistake in assimi- 



J i 



ii2 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

lating the representation of Garrick to the nature of a 
serving man. We are not necessarily to believe that 
Garrick made this mistake ; but on the showing of his 
eulogist he fell into an error quite as reprehensible as 
the error of the actor who played the king, and whose 
stilted declamation was recognised by Partridge as some- 
thing like acting. That player had at least a sense of 
the ofitique du theatre which demanded a more elevated 
style than would have suited the familiarity of daily inter- 
course. He knew he was there to act, to represent a 
king, to impress an idealised image on the spectator's 
mind, and he could not succeed by the naturalness of his 
own manner. That he failed in his attempt proves that 
he was an imperfect artist ; but the attempt was an 
attempt at art. Garrick (assuming the accuracy of 
Fielding's description) failed no less egregiously, though 
in a different way. He was afraid of being stilted, and 
he relapsed into vulgarity. He tried to be natural, with- 
out duly considering the kind of nature that was" to be 
represented. The supreme difficulty of an actor is to 
represent ideal character with such truthfulness that it 
shall affect us as real, not to drag down ideal character to 
the vulgar level. His art is one of representation, not of 



ON NATURAL ACTING. 113 

illusion. He has to use natural expressions, but he must 
sublimate them ; the symbols must be such as we can 
sympathetically interpret, and for this purpose they must 
be the expressions of real human feeling ; but just as the 
language is poetry, or choice prose, purified from the 
hesitancies, incoherences, and imperfections of careless 
daily speech, so must his utterance be measured, musical, 
and incisive— his manner typical and pictorial. If the 
language depart too widely from the logic of passion and 
truthfulness, we call it bombast ; if the elevation of the 
actor's style be not sustained by natural feeling, we call it 
mouthing and rant ; and if the language fall below the 
passion we call it prosaic and flat ; as we call the actor 
tame if he cannot present the character so as to interest 
us. The most general error of authors, and of actors, 
is turgidity rather than flatness. The striving to be 
effective easily leads into the error of exaggeration. But 
it by no means follows, as some persons seem to imply, 
that because exaggeration is a fault, tameness is a merit. 
Exaggeration is a fault because it is an untruth • but in 
art it is as easy to be untrue by falling below as by rising 
above naturalness. 

The acting of Mr. Horace Wigan, as the pious 
1 



H4 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

banker in 'The Settling Day,' which suggested these 
remarks, is quite as much below the truth of nature in 
its tameness and absence of individuality, as it would 
have been above the truth had he represented the con- 
ventional stage hypocrite. He did not by exaggeration 
shock our common sense ; but neither did he delight 
our artistic sense by his art. If his performance was 
without offence, it was also without charm. Some of the 
audience were doubtless gratified to notice the absence 
of conventionalism; but I suspect that the majority were 
tepid in their admiration ; and critics would ask whether 
Mr. Horace Wigan could have given a strongly-marked 
individuality to the character, and at the same time have 
preserved the ease and naturalness which the representation 
demanded. Is he not like some novelists, who can be 
tolerably natural so long as they are creeping on the 
level of everyday incident and talk, but who become 
absurdly unnatural the instant they have to rise to the 
'height of their high argument' either in character or 
passion? Miss Austen's novels are marvels of art, 
because they are exquisitely true, and interesting in 
their truth. Miss Austen's imitators fondly imagine 
that to be quiet and prosaic — in pages which might 



ON NATURAL ACTING, 



.as well have been left unwritten — is all that the 
simplicity of art demands. But in art, simplicity is 
economy, not meagreness : it is the absence of super- 
fluities, not the suppression of essentials ; it arises from 
an ideal generalisation of real and essential qualities, 
guided by an exquisite sense of proportion. 

If we once understand that naturalness in acting 
means truthful presentation of the character indicated by 
the author, and not the foisting of commonplace manner 
on the stage, there will be a ready recognition of each 
artist's skill, whether he represent the naturalness of a 
FalstarT, or the naturalness of a Sir Peter Teazle, the 
naturalness of a Hamlet, or the naturalness of Coriolanus. 
Kean in Shylock was natural ; Bouffe in Pere Grandet. 
Rachel in Phedre was natural ; Farren in Grandfather 
Whitehead. Keeley in Waddilove was natural ; Charles 
Mathews in Affable Hawk, and Got in Maitre Guerin< 
Naturalness being truthfulness, it is obvious that a 
coat-and-waistcoat realism demands a manner, delivery, 
and gesture wholly unlike the poetic realism of tragedy 
and comedy ; and it has been the great mistake of 
actors that they have too often brought with them into 



u6 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

the drama of ordinary life the style they have been ac- 
customed to in the drama of ideal life. 

The modern French actors have seen the error ; and 
some English actors have followed their example, and 
aimed at greater quietness and ' naturalness.' At the 
Olympic this is attended with some success. But even 
French actors, when not excellent, carry the reaction too' 
far j and in the attempt to be natural forget the ofitiquedu 
theatre, and the demands of art. They will sit upon side 
sofas, and speak with their faces turned away from the 
audience, so that half their words are lost ; and they will 
lounge upon tables, and generally comport themselves in 
a manner which is not only easy, but free and easy. The 
art of acting is not shown in giving a conversational tone 
and a drawing-room quietness, but in vividly presenting 
character, while never violating the proportions demanded 
on the one hand by the ofitique du theatre, and on the 
other by what the audience will recognise as truth. 

This judgment, and the principles on which it was 
based, appear to have found little favour in certain 
quarters ; and a writer in the Reader has attacked me in 
two columns of sarcasm and argument. He says, in 



ON NATURAL ACTING. 117 

reference to my article, that e few things are more painful 
than the nonsense which an exceedingly clever man may 
write about an art with which he has no real sympathy, 
to which he has ceased to give any serious thought.' 
I leave it to my readers to appreciate my imperfect 
sympathy and want of serious thought ; as to the non- 
sense I may have written, everyone knows how easily a 
man may set down nonsense, and believe it to be sense. 
The point which most pressingly forces itself upon me is, 
.that a writer who has given such prolonged and serious 
thought to the art of acting as my critic may be supposed 
to have given, should nevertheless have not yet mastered 
the initial principles on which that art rests. It is to 
me amazing how any man writing ex professo^ could cite 
KeanandEmil Devrient among natural actors, belonging 
to a ' school of acting in which nature is carefully and 
closely followed, and in which small attention is paid 
to idealised impressions.' I cannot explain how this 
writer's ' serious thought ' should have left him still in 
the condition of innocence which supposes that Art is 
delusion, not illusion ; and that the nearer the approach 
to every-day vulgarity of detail the more consummate 
is the artistic effect. 



n8 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



In trying to disengage the question of ' naturalness ' 
from its ambiguities, I referred to the criticism of 
Garrick's Hamlet which Fielding conveys through the 
verdict of Partridge, my object being to discriminate 
between the nature of Hamlet and the nature of Partridge; 
and I said that if Fielding were to be understood as 
correctly indicating Garrick's manner, that manner must 
have been false to nature and therefore bad art. On this- 
my critic observes : — 

' The reasons for this remarkable opinion are very 
shortly given. The melancholy sceptical prince in the 
presence of his father's ghost must have felt a tremulous 
and solemn awe, but cannot have felt the vulgar terror of 
a vulgar nature. The manner of a frightened Partridge 
can never have been at all like the manner of Hamlet. 
It is obvious that the naturalness required from Hamlet 
is very different from the naturalness of a Partridge ; 
and Fielding made a great mistake in assimilating 
the representation of Garrick to the nature of a 
serving-man. Ordinary people might find some difficulty 
in attaining the certainty which "L" has on this sub- 
ject. Very few men are so fortunate as to know a prince; 
fewer still have had the advantage of meeting ghosts ; it 



ON NATURAL ACTING. 119 

is therefore difficult for most of us to realise so definitely 
as " L." does what the manner of a prince towards a 
ghost would be. But the rather positive critic may be 
assumed to be right. Probably, if a ghost walked into 
Marlborough House, the manner of the Prince of Wales 
towards the intruder would be very different from that of 
the footman.' 

The answer to this is very simple. The manner of 
Hamlet must be the manner consistent with that of an 
ideal prince, and not the manner of a serving man, nor 
of one real prince, in Marlborough House or elsewhere. 
Had Shakspeare conceived a prince stupid, feeble, weak- 
eyed, weak-chested, or bold, coarse, and sensual, the 
actor would have been called upon to represent the ideals 
of these. But having conceived a princely Hamlet, i.e. 
an accomplished, thoughtful, dreamy young man — to re- 
present him as frightened at the ghost and behaving 
as a serving-man would behave, was not natural, conse- 
quently not ideal, for ideal treatment means treatment 
which is true to the nature of the character represented wider 
the technical conditions of the representation. 

This leads me to the main point at issue. I have 
always emphatically insisted on the necessity of actors 



120 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

being true to nature in the expression of natural emotions, 
although the technical conditions of the art forbid the ex- 
pressions being exactly those of real life ; but my critic, 
not understanding this, says : — 

1 In justice to " L.," however, it should be stated that 
he does not altogether object to natural acting, but only 
to acting which follows nature very closely. Being a writer 
who constructs as well as destroys, he explains what real 
dramatic art is. An actor should impress an idealised 
image on the spectator's mind ; he should " use natural 
expressions, but he must sublimate them," whatever that 
may mean ; his utterance must be " measured, musical, 
and incisive ; his manner typical and pictorial." ' 

It is clear not only from this passage, but from the 
examples afterwards cited, that my critic considers the 
perfection of art to lie in the closest reproduction of every- 
day experience. That an actor should raise the natural 
expressions into ideal expressions — that he should ' sub- 
limate ' them is so little understood by my critic, that he 
professes not to know what sublimating ' may mean.' I 
will not insult him by supposing that it is the word 
which puzzles him, or that he does not understand 
Dryden's verses : — 



ON NATURAL ACTING. 



As his actions rose, so raise they still their vein, 

In words whose weight best suits a sublimated strain. 

But I will ask hirn if he supposes that an actor, having 
to represent a character in situations altogether excep- 
tional, and speaking a language very widely departing 
from the language of ordinary life, would be true to the 
nature of that character and that language, by servilely 
reproducing the manners, expression, and intonations of 
ordinary life ? The poet is not closely following nature ; 
the poet is ideal in his treatment ; is the actor to be less 
so ? I am presumed to have been guilty of talking non- 
sense in requiring that the musical verse of the poet 
should be spoken musically, or the elaborate prose of 
the prose dramatist should be spoken with measured 
cadence and incisive effect. I cannot be supposed 
to approve of measured ' mouthing,' or to wish for 
turgidity in wishing for music and precision ; would the 
critic have verse declaimed like prose (naturally, as it 
is falsely called,) and prose gabbled with little reference 
to cadence and emphasis, like ordinary talk ? When he 
objects to the manner being typical, would he have it 
not to be recognisable? When he objects to the manner 
being pictorial, would he have it careless, ungraceful, the 



122 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



slouching of club-rooms and London streets carried 
into Verona or the Ardennes ? Obviously, the pictorial 
manner which would be natural (ideal) to Romeo or 
Rosalind, would be unnatural in Charles Surface or 
Lady Teazle. 

But so little does this writer discriminate between 
music and mouthing that he says : — 

' The performers may not come up to his standard, 
but it is satisfactory to think that their aim is in the right 
direction. No one will ever accuse Mr. Phelps or Mr. 
Creswick, or Miss Helen Faucit, of being too natural. 
These artists certainly have a highly idealised style. Their 
utterance may not be musical, but it is measured and 
incisive — with a vengeance. On the French stage things 
are less satisfactory. Many of the leading actors there 
have a foolish hankering after nature. The silly people 
who think that French acting is sometimes admirable, 
and that English acting is generally execrable, should 
correct their opinions by studying the canons of a higher 
criticism ; for the Paris actors have essentiality shallow 
views of their art. Got, in that marvellous passage in 
" Le Due Job," which has made grey-haired men cry like 
children, is much in error. He merely behaves just as a 



ON NATURAL ACTING. 123. 

warm-hearted man would behave on suddenly receiving 
the news of a dear friend's death ; and this has been 
thought to make his performance so intensely touching. 
But it is quite wrong ; his language is not " measured, 
musical, and incisive," his manner decidedly not " typical 
and pictorial." Sanson, with his satirical bonhomie in " Le 
Fils de Giboyer," has been much admired, because, having 
to act the Marquis d'Auberive, he was so precisely like a 
French nobleman of the old regime. His business, he 
should have learnt, was not to resemble a real marquis, 
but to " impress the idealised image " of a marquis upon 
the spectator's mind. The terrible reality of Delaunay's 
acting in the last scene of "On ne Badine pas avec 
F Amour " has made many spectators shudder ; but then 
it is so perfectly natural, the expressions are not the least 
" sublimated." ' 

If he knew more of the French stage, he would, I 
think, have paused before writing such a passage. He 
would know that Rachel was supreme in virtue of those . 
very qualities which he asserts the French actors to have 
relinquished in their hankering after nature ; he would 
know that Mdme. Plessy is the most musical, the. 
most measured, the most incisive speaker (whether of 



i2\ ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

Terse or prose) now on the stage ; he would know that 
Got, Sanson, and Regnier are great, actors, because they 
represent types, and the types are recognised as true. 

When we are told that Got ' merely behaves just as a 
warm-hearted man would behave on suddenly receiving 
•the news of a dear friend's death,' we ask what warm- 
hearted man ? A hundred different men would behave 
in a hundred different ways on such an occasion, would 
say different things, would express their emotions with 
different looks and gestures. The actor has to select. 
He must be typical. His expressions must be those 
which, while they belong to the recognised symbols of 
our common nature, have also the peculiar individual 
impress of the character represented. It is obvious, to 
anyone who reflects for a moment, that nature is often so 
reticent — that men and women express so little in their 
faces and gestures, or in their tones of what is tearing 
their hearts — that a perfect copy of almost any man's ex- 
pressions would be utterly ineffective on the stage. It is 
the actor's art to express in well-known symbols what an in- 
dividual man may be supposed to feel, and we, the specta- 
tors recognising these expressions, are thrown into a state 
of sympathy. Unless the actor follows nature sufficiently 



ON NATURAL ACTING. 125: 

to select symbols that are recognised as natural, he fails 
to touch us ; but as to any minute fidelity in copying the 
actual manner of murderers, misers, avengers, broken- 
hearted fathers, &c, we really have had so little expe- 
rience of such characters, that we cannot estimate the 
fidelity ; hence the actor is forced to be as typical as the 
poet is. Neither pretends closely to copy nature, but 
only to represent nature sublimated into the ideal. The 
nearer the approach to every-day reality implied by the 
author in his characters and language — the closer the- 
coat-and-waistcoat realism of the drama — the closer must 
be the actor's imitation of every-day manner ; but even 
then he must idealise, i.e. select and heighten — and it is 
for his tact to determine how much. 



126 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



CHAPTER XI. 

FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 

That our drama is extinct as literature, and our stage is 
in a deplorable condition of decline, no one ventures 
to dispute ; but there are two opinions as to whether a 
revival is possible, or even probable; and various opinions 
as to the avenues through which such a revival may be 
approached. There are three obvious facts which may 
be urged against the suggestions of hope : these are, the 
gradual cessation of all attempts at serious dramatic 
literature, and their replacement by translations from the 
French, or adaptations from novels ; the slow extinction 
of provincial theatres, which formed a school for the 
rearing of actors ; and, finally, the accident of genius on 
our stage being unhappily rarer than ever. In the face 
of these undeniable facts, the hopeful are entitled to 
advance facts of equal importance on their side. Never 
in the history of our stage were such magnificent rewards 






FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 127 

within the easy grasp of talent ; never were there such 
multitudes to welcome good acting. Only let the 
dramatist, or the actor, appear, and not London alone 
but all England, not England alone but all Europe, will 
•soon resound with his name. Dramatic literature may 
be extinct, but the dramatic instinct is ineradicable. 
The stage may be in a deplorable condition at present, 
but the delight in mimic representation is primal and 
indestructible. Thus it is that, in spite of people on all 
sides declaring that ' they have ceased to go to the theatre,' 
no sooner does an actor arise who is at all above the 
line, no sooner does a piece appear that has any special 
•source of attraction, than the public flock to the theatre 
as it never flocked in what are called - the palmy days ' of 
the drama. Fechter could play Hamlet for seventy 
consecutive nights : which to Garrick, Kemble, or 
Edmund Kean, would have sounded like the wildest 
hyperbole; and the greatest success of Liston and 
Mathews seems insignificant besides the success of 
Lord Dundreary. There is a ready answer to such 
facts conveyed in the sneer at public taste, and the 
assertion that all intelligence has departed, leaving only 
a vulgar craving for 'sensation pieces.' It is a cheap 



128 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

sneer. Sensation pieces are in the ascendant, but this 
is not because intelligence has departed, and there is 
no audience for better things, but simply because the 
number of pleasure-seekers is so much increased ; and at 
all times the bulk of the public has cared less for art than 
amusement. 1 If intelligent people now go to witness 
inferior pieces, it is because better things are not produced; 
and sensation pieces, although appealing to the lowest 
faculties, do appeal to them effectively. If there are 
crowds to see the 'Colleen Bawn' and the 'Duke's 
Motto,' it is because these pieces are really good of their 
kind j the kind may be a low kind ; but will anyone 
say that the legitimate drama has of late years been re- 
presented in a style to satisfy an intellectual audience ? 
Who would leave the ' comforts of the Saut-market ' for 
the manifold discomforts of a theatre, unless some strong 
intellectual or emotional stimulus were to be given in 
exchange? and who can be expected to submit with 
patience to lugubrious comedy and impossible tragedy, 
such as has been offered of late years to the British 

1 Et pour les sots acteurs 
Dieu crea le faux gout et les sots spectateurs. 

Sanson : I? Art The&traL 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 129 

public? Considering that these ' higher efforts ' had so 
dreary an effect, what wonder that even the intelligent 
public sought amusement in efforts which were not so 
exalted, but really did amuse ? A public seeks amuse- 
ment at the theatre, and turns impatiently from dreari- 
ness t$ Dundreariness. Let an Edmund Kean — or any 
faint approach to an Edmund Kean — appear to-morrow, 
and the public will rush to see him as- they rushed to 
hear Jenny Lind : the mob, because easily pleased, will 
rush to see anyone about whom the world is talking ; 
the intelligent public, because always ready to welcome 
genius. The proof of this eagerness to welcome any 
exceptional talent is seen in the success of Fechter and 
Ristori; and, in another direction, the proof of the 
deplorable condition of our stage is seen in the success of 
Mdlle. Stella Colas. Fechter and Ristori are both accom- 
plished actors ; not great actors, but still, within the limits 
of their powers, possessed of the mechanism of their art ; 
gifted, moreover, with physical and intellectual advantages 
which render them admirable representatives of certain 
parts. Mdlle. Colas, on the contrary, though she is sweetly 
pretty, and has a sympathetic voice, and a great deal of 

K 



i 3 o ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

untrained energy, is not yet an actress ; there are only 
the possibilities of an actress in her. 

The disadvantages of a language unfamiliar as a 
spoken language to the great bulk of the audience, and 
of companions who are scarcely on a level with the 
actors in the open-air theatres of Italy, have not pre- 
vented Ristori from achieving an immense success ; nor 
have the terrible disadvantages of an intonation and pro- 
nunciation which play havoc with Shakspeare's lines 
prevented Fechter from ' drawing the town. 5 There is 
something of fashion in all this, of course ; something 
to be attributed to the mere piquancy of the fact that 
Shakspeare is played by a French actor : but we must 
not exaggerate this influence. It may draw you to the 
theatre out of curiosity, but it will not stir your emotion 
when in the theatre ; it will not bring down tumultuous 
applause at the great scenes. No sooner are you moved, 
than you forget the foreigner in the emotion. And the 
proof that it really is what is excellent, and not what is 
adventitious, which creates the triumph of Fechter in 
Hamlet, is seen in the supreme ineffectiveness of his 
Othello. In ' Ruy Bias ' and the ' Corsican Brothers ' 
he was recognised as an excellent actor — not by any 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 131 

means a great actor, very far from that ; but one who in 
the present condition of the stage was considered a 
decided acquisition. He then played Hamlet, and 
gave a new and charming representation to a part in ■ 
which no actor has been known to fail ; hence the un- 
critical concluded that he was a great actor. But when 
he came to a part like Othello, which calls upon the 
rarest capabilities of an actor, the public then remembered 
that he was a foreigner, and discovered that he was not a 
tragedian. 

His Hamlet was one of the very best, and his Othello 
one of the very worst I have ever seen. On leaving the 
theatre after ' Hamlet,' I felt once more what a great play 
it was, with all its faults, and they are gross and numer- 
ous. On leaving the theatre after ' Othello/ I felt as if 
my old admiration for this supreme masterpiece of the 
art had been an exaggeration ; all the faults of the 
play stood out so glaringly, all its beauties were so 
dimmed and distorted by the acting of everyone con- 
cerned. It was necessary to recur to Shakspeare's pages 
to recover the old feeling. 

Reflecting on the contrast offered by these two per- 
formances, it seemed to me that a good lesson on the 



i 3 2 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

philosophy of acting was to be read there. Two cardinal 
points were illustrated by it. First, the very general 
confusion which exists in men's minds respecting natural- 
ism and idealism in art (which has been discussed in the 
last chapter) ; secondly, the essential limitation of an 
actor's sphere, as determined by his personality. Both 
in ' Hamlet ' and - Othello,' Fechter attempts to be 
natural, and keeps as far away as possible from the con- 
ventional declamatory style, which is by many mistaken 
for idealism only because it is unlike reality. His 
physique enabled him to represent Hamlet, and his 
naturalism was artistic. His physique wholly incapaci- 
tated him from representing Othello ; and his naturalism, 
being mainly determined by his personality, became utter 
feebleness. I do not mean that the whole cause of his 
failure rests with his physical incapacity, for, as will pre- 
sently be shown, his conception of the part is as ques- 
tionable as his execution is feeble ; but he might have 
had a wrong conception of the part, and yet have been 
ten times more effective, had nature endowed him with a 
physique of more weight and intensity. Twenty Othellos 
I have seen, with far less intelligence, but with more 
effective representative qualities, whose performances 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 133 

have stirred the very depths of the soul ; whereas I can- 
not imagine any amount of intelligence enabling Fech- 
ter's personality to make the performance satisfactory. 

His Hamlet was ' natural ; ' but this was not owing 
to the simple fact of its being more conversational 
and less stilted than usual. If Shakspeare's grandest 
language seemed to issue naturally from Fechter's lips, 
and did not strike you as out of place, which it so 
often does when mouthed on the stage, the reason 
was that he formed a tolerably true conception of 
Hamlet's nature, and could represent that conception. 
It was his personality which enabled him to represent 
this conception. Many of the spectators had a con- 
ception as true, or truer, but they could not have repre- 
sented it. This is self-evident. Naturalism truly means 
the reproduction of those details which characterise the 
nature of the thing represented. Realism means truth, 
not vulgarity. Truth of the higher as of the lower 
forms : truth of passion, and truth of manners. As Sanson 
finely says : — 

L'art c'est le naturel en doctrne erige. 
The nature of a Macbeth is . not the nature of an 



134 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

Othello; the speech of Achilles is not the speech of 
Thersites. The truth of the ' Madonna di San Sisto ' is 
not the truth of Murillo's 'Beggar Girl.' But artists 
and critics often overlook this. Actors are especially- 
prone to overlook it, and, in trying to be natural, 
they sink into the familiar ; though that is as un- 
natural as if they were to attempt to heighten the reality 
of the Apollo by flinging a paletot over his naked 
shoulders. It is this error into which Fechter falls in 
Othello ; he vulgarises the part in the attempt to make it 
natural. Instead of the heroic, grave, impassioned 
Moor, he represents an excitable Creole of our own day. 

Intellectually and physically his Hamlet so satisfies 
the audience, that they exclaim, ' How natural ! ' Ham- 
let is fat, according to his mother's testimony ; but he is 
also — at least in Ophelia's eyes — very handsome — 

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, 
The glass of fashion and the mould of form, 
The observed of all observers. 

Fechter is lymphatic, delicate, handsome, and with 
his long flaxen curls, quivering sensitive nostrils, fine eye, 
and sympathetic voice, perfectly represents the graceful 
prince. His aspect and bearing are such that the eye 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 135 

rests on him with delight. Our sympathies are completely 
secured. All those scenes which demand the qualities 
of an accomplished comedian he plays to perfection. 
Seldom have the scenes with the players, with 
Polonius, with Horatio, with Rosenkranz and Guilden- 
stern, or the quieter monologues, been better played; 
they are touched with so cunning a grace, and a manner 
so natural, that the effect is delightful. We not only 
feel in the presence of an individual, a character, but 
feel that the individual is consonant with our previous 
conception of Hamlet, and with the part assigned him in 
the play. The passages of emotion also are rendered 
with some sensibility. His delightful and sympathetic 
voice, and the unforced fervour of his expression, 
triumph over the foreigner's accent and the foreigner's 
mistakes in emphasis. This is really a considerable 
triumph ; for although Fechter pronounces English very 
well for a Frenchman, it is certain that his accent greatly 
interferes with the due effect of the speeches. But the 
foreign accent is as nothing compared with the frequent 
error of emphasis ; and this surely he might overcome by 
diligent study, if he would consent to submit to the 
rigorous criticism of some English friend, who would 



136 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

correct him every time he errs. The sense is often 
perturbed, and sometimes violated, by this fault. Yet so 
great is the power of true emotion, that even this is for- 
gotten directly he touches the feelings of the audience ; 
and in his great speech, ' O what a rogue and peasant 
slave am I ! ' no one hears the foreigner. 

Physically then we may say that his Hamlet is 
perfectly satisfactory ; nor is it intellectually open to 
more criticism than must always arise in the case of a 
character which admits of so many readings. It is cer- 
tainly a fine conception, consonant in general with what 
the text of Shakspeare indicates. It is the nearest 
approach I have seen to the realisation of Goethe's idea, 
expounded in the celebrated critique in Wilhelm Meister, 
that there is a burden laid on Hamlet too heavy for his 
soul to bear. The refinement, the feminine delicacy, the 
vacillation of Hamlet are admirably represented : and it 
is only in the more tragic scenes that we feel any short 
coming. For these scenes he wants the tragedian's 
personality, and once for all let me say that by person- 
ality I do not simply mean the qualities of voice and 
person, but the qualities which give the force of animal 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 137 

passion demanded by tragedy, and which cannot be 
represented except by a certain animal power. 

There is one point, however, in his reading of the 
part which seems to me manifestly incorrect. The error, 
if error it be, is not peculiar to him, but has been shared 
by all the other Hamlets, probably because they did not 
know how to represent what Shakspeare has indicated 
rather than expressly set down. And as there is nothing 
in his physique which would prevent the proper repre- 
sentation of a different conception, I must assume that 
the error is one of interpretation. 

Much discussion has turned on the question of Ham- 
let's madness, whether it be real or assumed. It is not 
possible to settle this question. Arguments are strong 
on both sides. He may be really mad, and yet, with 
that terrible consciousness of the fact which often visits 
the insane, he may ' put an antic disposition on,' as a 
sort of relief to his feelings. Or he may merely assume 
madness as a means of accounting for any extravagance 
of demeanour into which the knowledge of his father's 
murder may betray him. Shakspeare has committed the 
serious fault of not making this point clear ; a modern 



138 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

writer who should commit such a fault would get no 
pardon. The actor is by no means called upon to settle 
such points. One thing, however, he is called upon to 
do, and that is, not to depart widely from the text, not 
to misrepresent what stands plainly written. Yet this 
the actors do in Hamlet. They may believe that Shak- 
speare never meant Hamlet to be really mad ; but they 
cannot deny, and should not disregard, the plain lan- 
guage of the text— namely, that Shakspeare meant 
Hamlet to be in a state of intense cerebral excitement, 
seeming like madness. His sorrowing nature has been 
suddenly ploughed to its depths by a horror so great as 
to make him recoil every moment from the belief in its 
reality. The shock, if it has not destroyed his sanity, 
has certainly unsettled him. Nothing can be plainer than 
this. Every line speaks it. We see it in the rambling 
incoherence of his 'wild and whirling words' to his 
fellow-watchers and fellow-witnesses ; but as this may be 
said to be assumed by him (although the motive for such 
an assumption is not clear, as he might have ' put them 
off/ and yet retained his coherence), I will appeal to the 
impressive fact of the irreverence with which in this 
scene he speaks of 'his father and to his father — language 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 139 

which Shakspeare surely never meant to be insignificant, 
and which the actors always omit. Here is the scene 
after the exit of the ghost : — 

Enter Horatjo and Marcellus. 

Mar. How is't, my noble lord ? 

Hor. What news, my lord V a 

Ham. O, wonderful ! 

Hor. Good, my lord, tell it. 

Ham. No ; 

You'll reveal it. 

Hor. Not I, my lord, by heaven. 

Mar. Nor I, my lord. 

Ham. How say you then ; would heart of man once think it ? 
But you'll be secret, — 

Hor., Mar. Ay, by heaven, my lord. 

Ham. There's ne'er a villain, dwelling in all Denmark, 
But he's an arrant knave. 

Hor. There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave, 
To tell us this. 

Ham. Why, right ; you are in the right ; 
And so, without more circumstance at all, 
I hold it fit that we shake hands, and part ; 
You, as your business and desire shall point you — 
For every man has business and desire, 
Such as it is — and for mine own poor part, 
Look you, I'll go pray. 

Hor. These are but wild and whirling words, my lord. 

Ham. I'm sorry they offend you, heartily : 
Yes, 'faith, heartily. 

Hor. There's no offence, my lord. 

Ham. Yes, by St. Patrick, but there is, my lord. 



Ho ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

And much offence too, touching this vision here. 
It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you ; 
For your desire to know what is between us, 
O'ermaster it as you may. And now, good friends, 
As you are friends, scholars, and soldiers, 
Give me one poor request. 

Hor. What is't, my lord ? 

We will. 

Ham. Never make known what you have seen to-night. 

Hor. , Mar. My lord, we will not. 

Ham. Nay/ but swear't. 

Hor. In faith, 

My lord, not I. 

Mar. Nor I, my lord, in faith. 

Ham. Upon my sword. 

Mar. We have sworn, my lord, already. 

Hani. Indeed, upon my sword, indeed. 

Ghost. [Beneath.] Swear. 

Ham. Ha, ha, boy! say 'st thou so ? art thou there, truepenny? 
Come on — yoic hear this fellow in the cellerage — 
Consent to swear. 

Hor. Propose the oath, my lord. 

Ham. Never to speak of this that you have seen. 
Swear by my sword. 

Ghost. [Beneath.] Swear. 

Ham. Hie et ubique ? then we'll shift our ground : — 
Come hither, gentlemen, 
And lay your hands again upon my sword : 
Never to speak of this that you have heard, 
Swear by my sword. 

Ghost. [Beneath.] Swear. 

Ham. Well said, old mole I canst work z' the ground so fast ? 
A worthy pioneer ! — Once more remove, good friends. 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 141 

Now, why are these irreverent words omitted ? Be- 
cause the actors feel them to be irreverent, incongruous ? 
If spoken as Shakspeare meant them to be — as Hamlet in 
his excited and bewildered state must have uttered them 
— they would be eminently significant. It is evading the 
difficulty to omit them ; and it is a departure from 
Shakspeare's obvious intention. Let but the actor enter 
into the excitement of the situation, and make visible the 
hurrying agitation which prompts these wild and whirling 
words, he will then find them expressive, and will throw 
the audience into corresponding emotion. 

But this scene is only the beginning. From the 
moment of the Ghost's departure. Hamlet is a changed 
man. All the subsequent scenes should be impregnated 
with vague horror, and an agitation compounded of feverish 
desire for vengeance with the perplexities of thwarting 
doubt as to the reality of the story which has been heard. 
This alternation of wrath, and of doubt as to whether he 
has not been the victim of an hallucination, should be re- 
presented by the feverish agitation of an unquiet mind, 
visible even under all the outward calmness which it may 
be necessary to put on ; whereas the Hamlets I have seen 
are perfectly calm and self-possessed when they are not 



142 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

in a tempest of rage, or not feigning madness to deceive 
the King. 

It is part and parcel of this erroneous conception as 
to the state of Hamlet's mind (unless it be the mistake of 
substituting declamation for acting) which, as I believe, 
entirely misrepresents the purport of the famous soliloquy 
— ' To be, or not to be.' This is not a set speech to be 
declaimed to pit, boxes, and gallery, nor is it a moral thesis \ 
debated by Hamlet in intellectual freedom ; yet one or 
the other of these two mistakes is committed by all actors. 
Because it is a fine speech, pregnant with thought, it has 
been mistaken for an oratorical display; but I think 
Shakspeare's genius was too eminently dramatic to have 
committed so great an error as to substitute an oration for 
an exhibition of Hamlet's state of mind. The speech is 
passionate, not reflective ; and it should be so spoken as 
if the thoughts were wrung from the agonies of a soul 
hankering after suicide as an escape from evils, yet terrified 
at the dim sense of greater evils after death. Not only 
would such a reading of the speech give it tenfold dramatic 
force, but it would be the fitting introduction to the wild- 
ness of the scene, which immediately succeeds, with 
Ophelia. This scene has also been much discussed. To 






FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 143 

render its strange violence intelligible, actors are wont to 
indicate, by their looking towards the door, that they 
suspect the King, or some one else, to be watching ; and 
the wildness then takes its place among the assumed ex- 
travagances of Hamlet. Fechter also conceives it thus. 
I cannot find any warrant in Shakspeare for such a read- 
ing ; and it is adopted solely to evade a difficulty which 
no longer exists when we consider Hamlet's state of 
feverish excitement. I believe, therefore, that Hamlet is 
not disguising his real feelings in this scene, but is 
terribly in earnest. If his wildness seem unnatural, I 
would ask the actors what they make of the far greater 
extravagance with which he receives the confirmation of 
his doubts by the effect of the play upon the King ? Here, 
it is to be observed, there is no pretext for assuming an 
extravagant demeanour • no one is watching now ; he is 
alone with his dear friend and confidant, Horatio ; and yet 
note his conduct. Seeing the King's guilt, he exclaims — 

His name's Gonzago ; the story is extant, and writ in choice 
Italian : you shall see anon, * how the murtherer gets the love of 
Gonzago' s wife. 

Ofih. The king rises. 

Ham. What ! frighted with false fire ! 

Queen. How fares my lord ? 

Pol. Give o'er the play. 



144 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

King. Give me some light : — away ! 

All. Lights, lights, lights ! 

{Exeunt all but Ham. and Hor. 

Ham. Why, let the strucken deer go weep, 

The hart ungalled play : 
For some must watch, while some must sleep ; 

So runs the world away. — 
Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers (if the rest of my for- 
tunes turn Turk with me), with two Provencal roses on my razed 
shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir ? 

Hor. Half a share. 

Ham. A whole one, ay. 
For thou dost know, O Damon dear, 

This realm dismantled was 
Of Jove himself; and now reigns here 
A very, very peacock. 

Hor. You might have rhymed 

Ham. O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand 
pound. Didst perceive ? 

Hor. Very well, my lord. 

Ham. Upon the talk of the poisoning, — 

Hor. I did very well note him. 

Ha?n. Ha, ha ! — Come, some music ; come, the recorders. — 
For if the king like not the comedy, 
Why, then, belike, he likes it not, perdy. 

Of course the actors omit the most significant of these 
passages, because they are afraid of being comic ; but, if 
given with the requisite wildness, these passages would be 
terrible in their grotesqueness. It is true that such wild- 
ness and grotesqueness would be out of keeping with any 
representation of Hamlet which made him calm, and only 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 145 

assuming madness at intervals. But is such a conception 
Shakspearian ? 

Fechter is not specially to be blamed for not having 
made Hamlet's state of excitement visible throughout ; 
but although his personality debars him from due repre- 
sentation of the more tragic scenes, it would not debar him 
from representing Hamlet's agitation if he conceived it 
truly. On the whole, however, I repeat that his perform- 
ance was charming, because natural. 

In direct contrast was the performance of Othello. 
It had no one good quality. False in conception, it 
was feeble in execution. He attempted to make the 
character natural, and made it vulgar. His idea of the 
character and of the play from first to last showed 
strange misconception. He departed openly from the 
plain language of the text, on points where there is 
no justification for the departure. Thus, Othello tells 
us he is ' declined into the vale of years ; ' Fechter 
makes him young. Othello is black — the very tragedy 
lies there ; the whole force of the contrast, the whole 
pathos and extenuation of his doubts of Desdemona, 
depend on this blackness. Fechter makes him a half- 
caste, whose mere appearance would excite no repul- 

L 



146 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

sion in any woman out of America. Othello is grave, 
dignified, a man accustomed to the weight of great respon- 
sibilities, and to the command of armies ; Fechter is 
unpleasantly familiar, paws Iago about like an over- 
demonstrative schoolboy ; shakes hands on the slightest 
provocation ; and bears himself like the hero of French 
drame, but not like a hero of tragedy. 

In his edition of the play, Fechter urges two con- 
siderations. First, that Shakspeare is to be acted, not 
recited ; secondly, that tradition ought to be set aside. 
In both points he will find most people agreeing with him, 
but few willing to see any novelty in these positions. 
We, who remember Kean in Othello, may surely be ex- 
cused if we believe that we have seen Othello acted, and 
so acted as there is little chance of our seeing it acted 
again ; the consequence of which is, that we look upon 
Fechter's representation as acting, indeed, but as very 
bad acting. 

Then as to tradition, we are willing enough, nowadays, 
to give up all conventional business which does not 
justify itself ; but we are very far from supposing that, 
because Fechter's arrangement of the business is new, 
therefore it is justifiable or acceptable. In some respects 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 147 

it is good ; in the arrangement of the scene in the senate 
there was a very striking improvement, which gave a really 
natural air to the scene ; and some other scenical details 
show a decided faculty for stage arrangement. But in 
many others there is a blundering perversity and dis- 
regard of the obvious meaning of the text, which is only 
to be accounted for on the supposition that Fechter 
wished to make ' Othello ' a drame such as would suit the 
Porte St. Martin. 

The principle has doubtless been the same as that 
which, in a less degree, and under happier inspiration, 
made the success of ' Hamlet': the desire to be natural — 
the aim at realism. But here the confusion between 
realism and vulgarism works like poison. It is not con- 
sistent with the nature of tragedy to obtrude the details 
of daily life. All that lounging on tables and lolling 
against chairs, which help to convey a sense of reality 
in the drame, are as unnatural in tragedy as it would 
be to place the ' Sleeping Fawn ' of Phidias on a com- 
fortable feather-bed. When Fechter takes out his door- 
key to let himself into his house, and, on coming back, 
relocks the door and pockets the key, the intention is 
doubtless to give an air of reality ; the effect is to make 
l 2 



148 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

us forget the 'noble Moor,' and to think of a sepoy. 
When he appears leaning on the shoulder of lago (the 
great general and his ensign !), when he salutes the 
personages with graceful prettinesses, when he kisses the 
hand of Desdemona, and when he employs that favourite 
gesticulation which reminds us but too forcibly of a 
gamiti threatening to throw a stone, he is certainly natu- 
ral,— -but according to whose nature ? 

In general, it may be said that, accomplished an actor 
as Fechter certainly is, he has allowed the acting-manager 
to gain the upper hand. In his desire to be effective by 
means of small details of 'business,' he has entirely 
frittered away the great effects of the drama. He has 
yet to learn the virtue of simplicity ; he has yet to learn 
that tragedy acts through the emotions, and not through 
the eye ; whatever distracts attention from the passion of 
the scene is fatal. 

Thus, while his Hamlet satisfied the audience by 
being at once naturally conceived and effectively repre- 
sented, his Othello left the audience perfectly cold, or 
interested only as by a curiosity, because it was unnatu- 
rally conceived and feebly executed. Had the execution 
been fine, the false conception would have been forgotten, 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 149 

or pardoned. Many a ranting Othello contrives to 
interest and to move his audience without any conception 
at all, simply uttering the language of Shakspeare with 
force, and following the traditional business. Shakspeare, 
if the personality of the actor be not too violently in con- 
tradiction with the text, carries effect in every scene ; we 
listen and are moved. But unhappily Fechter's person- 
ality is one wholly unsuited to such a character as 
Othello. This is evident from the first. My doubts 
began with the first act. In it Othello has little to do, 
but much to be. In this masterpiece of dramatic expo- 
sition the groundwork of the play is grandly laid out. It 
presents the hero as a great and trusted warrior, a simple, 
calm, open, reliant nature — a man admirable not only in 
his deeds, but in his lofty and heroic soul. Unless you 
get a sense of this, you are as puzzled at Desdemona's 
choice as Brabantio is. But it is inevitable that with 
such a personality as Fechter's you should feel none of 
this. He represents an affectionate but feeble young 
gentleman, whose position in the army must surely have 
been gained by ' purchase.' This is not the actor's fault. 
Even had he been calm and simple in his gestures, he 
could not have been dignified and impressive ; nature 



ISO ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

had emphatically said No to such an effect Voice and 
bearing would have failed him had his conception been 
just. An unintelligent actor who is at the same time a 
superb animal, will be impressive in this act if he is 
simply quiet. If, for example, you compare Gustavus 
Brooke with Fechter, you will see this at once. Still 
more strikingly is this seen on a comparison of Edmund 
Kean with Fechter. Kean was undersized — very much 
smaller than Fechter ; and yet what a grand bearing he 
had ! what an impressive personality ! 

In the second act my doubts increased. The entrance 
of Othello, with the flame of victory in his eye, eager to 
clasp his young wife to his breast, and share with her his 
triumph and his joy, was an opportunity for htmgnatural 
which Fechter wholly missed. Never was there a tamer 
meeting. Kean's tones, ' O my fair warrior ! ' are still 
ringing in my ears, though a quarter of a century must 
have elapsed since I heard them; but I cannot recall 
Fechter's tones, heard only the other night. I only recall 
a vision of him holding his wife at most 'proper' distance, 
kissing her hand, his tone free from all tremulous emotion, 
though he has to say — 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 151 

O my soul's joy ! 
If after every tempest come such calms, 
May the winds blow till they have wakened death ! 

If it were now to die 
'Twere now to be most happy ; for I fear 
My soul hath her content so absolute 
That not another comfort like to this 
Succeeds in unknown fate. 

And from Desdemona he turns to the gentlemen of 
Cyprus, as affable and calm as if he had but just come 
home from a morning stroll. There was none of the 
emotion of the situation. 

In the scene of the brawl we have the first indication 
of Othello's tremendous vehemence when roused. Fechter 
was loud, but he was not fierce. 1 It is characteristic of 
his whole performance in the passionate parts, that he 
goes up the stage and bids them 

Silence that dreadful bell, it frights the isle 
From her propriety, 

with an accent of impatient irritability, as if he were angry 
at the bell's preventing his hearing what was to be said. 

But little as the performance in these two acts came 
up to even my moderate expectations of Fechter's power 

1 Fuyant le naturel sans trouver la grandeur. 

Sanson : VArt Thlatrah 



152 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

to represent Othello, it was not until the third act that I 
finally pronounced judgment That act is the test of a 
tragedian. If he cannot produce a great effect there, he 
need never seek elsewhere for an opportunity ; the 
greatest will find in it occasion for all his powers, and the 
worst will hardly miss some effects. To think of what 
Edmund Kean was in this act ! When shall we see again 
that lion-like power and lion-like grace— that dreadful 
culmination of wrath, alternating with bursts of agony — 
that Oriental and yet most natural gesture, which even in 
its naturalness preserved a grand ideal propriety (for ex- 
ample, when his joined uplifted hands, the palms being 
upwards, were lowered upon his head, as if to keep his 
poor brain from bursting) — that exquisitely touching 
pathos, and that lurid flame of vengeance flashing from 
his eye? When shall we hear again those tones : 'Not a 
jot, not a jot ' — ' Blood, Iago, blood,' — ' But oh, the pity 
of it, Iago ! the pity of it ' ? Certainly no one ever 
expected that Fechter, with his sympathetic temperament 
and soft voice, could approach the tragic grandeur of the 
elder Kean ; but neither could anyone who had heard 
that his Othello was 'the talk of the town' have supposed 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 153 

that this third act would fail even to move the applause 
of an audience very ready to applaud. 

In saying that he failed to arouse the audience, I am 
saying simply what I observed and felt. The causes of 
that failure may be open to discussion : the fact is irresis- 
tible ; and the causes seem to me clear enough. He is 
incapable of representing the torrent of passion, which 
by him is broken up into numerous petty waves : we 
see the glancing foam, breaking along many lines, in- 
stead of one omnipotent and roaring surf. He is loud — 
and weak ; irritable, not passionate. The wrath escapes 
in spirts, instead of flowing in one mighty tide ; and after 
each spirt he is calm, not shaken by the tremulous subsi- 
dence of passion. This lapse from the wildness of rage 
to the calmness of logical consideration or argumentative 
expostulation, this absence of gradation and after-glow of 
passion, I have already indicated as the error com- 
mitted by Charles Kean and other tragedians j it arises 
from their not identifying themselves with the feeling 
of the part. 

To give what Bacon calls an * ostensive instance/ let 
me refer to the opening of the fourth act. Othello, 
worked upon by Iago's horrible suggestions, is so shaken 



154 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

by wrath and grief that he falls down in a fit. Fechter, 
probably because he felt that he could not render the 
passion so as to make this natural, omits the scene, and 
opens the act with Iago soliloquising over his senseless 
victim. In spite of the awkward attitude in which 
Fechter is lying, those of the audience who are not 
familiar with the play imagine that Othello is sleepi7ig ; 
and when he rises from the couch and begins to speak, 
he is indeed as calm and unaffected by the fit as if he 
had only been asleep. 

Another source of weakness is the redundancy of 
gesture and the desire to make a number of points, in- 
stead of concentrating attention on the general effect. 
Thus, when he is roused to catch Iago by the throat, in- 
stead of an accumulation of threats, he jerks out a suc- 
cession of various threats, looking away from Iago every 
now and then, and varying his gestures, so as to destroy 
all sense of climax. 

If it is a fact — and I appeal to the audience as wit- 
nesses — that we do not feel deep pity for the noble Moor 
and do not sympathise with his irrational yet natural 
wrath, when Fechter plays the part, surely the reason can 
only be that the part is not represented naturally ? Now 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 155 

much of this, I repeat, is the necessary consequence of 
his personality. He could not represent it naturally even 
if he conceived the part truly ; and, as already intimated, 
the conception is not true. Certain points of the concep- 
tion have been touched on ; I will now specify two others. 
The unideal (consequently unnatural) representation may 
be illustrated by the manner in which he proposes, instead 
of ordering Cassio's death. Shakspeare's language is 
peremptory : — 

Within these three days let me hear thee say 
That Cassio's not alive. 

The idea in his mind is simply that Cassio has deserved 
death. He does not trouble himself about the means ; 
and surely never thinks of murder. A general who orders 
a soldier to be hung, or shot, without trial, is not a mur- 
derer. Yet Fechter proposes a murder, and proposes it with 
a sort of subdued hesitation, as if conscious of the crime. 
He thus completely bears out Rymer's sarcasm: 'He sets 
Iago to the fighting part, to kill Cassio ; and chuses him- 
self to murder the silly woman, his wife, that was like to 
make no resistance.' l 

1 Rymer : A Short View of Tragedy, its original excellency and 
corruption. 1693. P. 93. This most amusing attack on Othello 



156 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

The second illustration which may be noticed, is the 
perverse departure from the obvious meaning of the text, 
which, in his desire for originality and naturalness in the 
business, makes him destroy the whole art of Shakspeare's 
preparation, and makes the jealousy of Othello seem pre- 
posterous. One defect in the play which has been felt by 
all critics is the rapidity with which Othello is made to 
believe in his wife's guilt. Now, allowing for the rapidity 
which the compression necessary to dramatic art renders 
almost inevitable, I think Shakspeare has so exhibited 
the growth of the jealousy, that it is only on reflection 
that the audience becomes aware of the slight grounds on 
which the Moor is convinced. It is the actor's part to 
make the audience feel this growth — to make them go 
along with Othello, sympathising with him, and believifig 
with him. Fechter deliberately disregards all the plain 
meaning of the text, and makes the conviction sudden 
and preposterous. It is one of his new arrangements 
that Othello, when the tempter begins his diabolical in- 
sinuation, shall be seated at a table reading and signing 
papers. When first I heard of this bit of ' business,' it 

reads very often like sound criticism, when one has just witnessed 
the performances at the Princess's Theatre. 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 157 

struck me as admirable ; and indeed I think so still ; 
although the manner in which Fechter executes it is one 
of those lamentable examples in which the dramatic art is 
subordinated to serve theatrical effect. 1 That Othello 
should be seated over his papers, and should reply to 
Iago's questions while continuing his examination, and 
affixing his signature, is natural ; but it is not natural — 
that is, not true to the nature of Othello and the situa- 
tion — for him to be dead to the dreadful import of Iago's 
artful suggestions. Let us hear Shakspeare. 

Othello and Iago enter as Cassio takes leave of Des- 
demona; whereupon Iago says, meaning to "be heard, 
' Ha ! I like not that ! ' 

Othello. What dost thou say ? 

Iago. Nothing, my lord : or if — I know not what. 

Othello. Was not that Cassio parted from my wife ? 

Iago. Cassio, my lord ? no sure, I cannot think it, 
That he would steal away, so guilty-like, 
Seeing your coming. 

Othello. I do believe 'twas he. 

Desdem. How now, my lord. 
I have been talking with a suitor here, 
A man that languishes in your displeasure. 

1 Having now seen Salvini in Othello I conclude that this 
' business ' was imitated from him — but Fechter failed to imitate 
the expression of emotion which renders such business significant. 



158 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

Othello. Who is't you mean ? 

Des. Why your lieutenant Cassio ; good my lord, 
If I have any grace or power to move you, 
His present reconciliation take. 
I prithee call him back. 

Otiiello. Went he hence now ? 

Des. Ay sooth ; so humbled 
That he hath left part of his grief with me 
To suffer with him. Good love, call him back. 

Othello. Not now, sweet Desdemon ; some other time. 

Des. But shall't be shortly ? 

Othello. The sooner, sweet, for you. 

Des. Shall't be to-night at supper ? 

Othello. No, not to night. 

Des. To-morrow, dinner, then ? 

Othello. I shall not dine at home. 

These short evasive sentences are subtly expressive of 
the state of Othello's mind \ but Fechter misrepresents 
them by making Othello free from all misgiving. He 
1 toys with her curls/ and treats her as a father might 
treat a child who was asking some favour which could not 
be granted yet which called for no explicit refusal. If the 
scene stood alone, I should read it differently ; but stand- 
ing as it does between the two attempts of Iago to fill 
Othello's mind with suspicion, the meaning is plain enough. 
He has been made uneasy by Iago's remarks ; very natur- 
ally, his bearing towards his wife reveals that uneasiness. A 
vague feeling, which he dares not shape into a suspicion, 



i 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 159 

disturbs him. She conquers him at last by her winning 
ways ; and he vows that he will deny her nothing. 

If this be the state of mind in which the great scene 
begins, it is obviously a serious mistake in Fechter to sit 
down to his papers, perfectly calm, free from all idea 
whatever of what Iago has suggested ; and answering 
Iago's insidious questions as if he did not divine their 
import. So clearly does Othello divine their import, 
that it is he, and not Iago, who expresses in words their 
meaning. It is one of the artifices of Iago to make his 
victim draw every conclusion from premises which are 
put before him, so that, in the event of detection, he can 
say, ' I said nothing, I made no accusation.' All he 
does is to lead the thoughts of Othello the conclusion 
desired. The scene thus begins : — 

Iago. My noble lord — 
Othello. What dost thou say, Iago? 
Iago. Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, 
Know of your love ? 

Now Iago perfectly well knew this, for he had heard 
Desdemona say so just the minute before. 

Othello. He did from first to last : Why dost thou ask ? 
Iago. But for the satisfaction of my thought ; 
No further har?n. 



160 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

Properly, Iago's answer should end at the word thought ; 
that is the answer to the question ; but he artfully adds 
the suggestion of harm, which falls like a spark on the 
inflammable mind of his victim, who eagerly asks, ' Why 
of thy thought, lago ? ' 

Iago. I did not think he had been acquainted with her. 
Othello. Oh yes ; and went between us very oft. 
Iago. Indeed? 

Othello. Indeed ? Ay, Indeed : Discern'st thou aught in that ? 
Is he not honest ? 

Iago. Honest, my lord ? 
Othello. Honest ? ay, honest ? 
Iago. My lord, for aught I know. 
Othello. What dost thou think ? 
Iago. Think, my lord ? 

It is difficult to comprehend how anyone should fail to 
interpret this dialogue, every word of which is an in- 
crease of the slowly growing suspicion. If the scene 
ended here, there might indeed be a defence set up for 
Fechter's notion that Othello should reply to the insinua- 
tion in a careless manner, ' playing with his pen as he 
speaks ; ' but no defence is permissible for one moment 
when we know how the scene proceeds. 

Othello. Think, my lord ? By heaven he echoes me ! 
As if there were some monster in his thought 
Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something ; 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 161 

I heard thee say but now, thou lik'dst not that 

When Cassio left my wife : what didst not like ? 

And when I told thee he was of my counsel 

In my whole course of wooing, thou cry'dst, Indeed ? 

And didst contract and purse thy brow together, 

As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain 

Some horrible conceit. If thou dost love me 

Show me thy thought. 

Fechter would perhaps urge that this language is not to 
be understood seriously, but as the banter of Othello at 
seeing Iago purse his brow and look mysterious about 
trifles. It is in this sense that he plays the part. But 
how widely he errs, and how seriously Othello is dis- 
turbed, may be read in his next speech : — 

I know thou'rt full of love and honesty, 

And weigh'st thy words before thou giv'st them breath, 

Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more ; 

For such things in a false disloyal knave 

Are tricks of custom ; but in a man that's just 

They're close denotements, working from the heart 

That passion cannot rule. 

Is this banter ? and when he bids Iago 

Speak to me, as to thy thinkings, 
As thou dost ruminate j and give thy worst of thoughts 
The worst ofzuords, 

it is* impossible to suppose that his mind has not already 

M 



162 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

shaped the worst suspicions which he wishes Iago to 
confirm. 

Here, I affirm, the plain sense of Shakspeare is not 
only too clearly indicated to admit of the most ingenious 
reading in another sense, but any other reading would 
destroy the dramatic art with which the scene is con- 
ducted, because it would destroy those indications of the 
growth of the feeling, which feeling, being really founded 
on Iago's suggestions and the smallest possible external 
evidence, becomes preposterous when the evidence alone 
is appealed to. Now, Fechter so little understands this, 
as not only to miss such broadly marked indications, but 
to commit the absurdity of making Othello suddenly 
convinced, and by what ? by the argument of Iago, that 
Desdemona deceived her father, and may therefore de- 
ceive her husband ! But that argument (setting aside 
the notion of a character like Othello being moved by 
merely intellectual considerations) had already been 
forcibly presented to his mind by her father : — 

Look to her, Moor, have a quick eye to see : 
She did deceive her father, and may thee. 

Whereupon he replies, 'My life upon her faith/ And 
so he would reply to Iago, had not his mind already 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 163 

been filled with distrust. Fechter makes him careless, 
confident, unsuspicious, until Iago suggests her decep- 
tion of her father, and then at once credulous and over- 
come. This may be the art of the Porte St. Martin, or 
the Varietes ; it is not the art of Shakspeare. 

Whatever may be our estimate of Fechter, his suc- 
cess with Hamlet proves that there is a vast and 
hungry public ready to welcome and reward any good 
dramatist or fine actor ; but in default of these, willing to 
be amused by spectacles and sensation pieces. Whether 
the dramatist or actor will arise, and by his influence 
create a stage once more, is a wider question. I shall 
not enter upon it here, nor shall I touch on the causes of 
the present condition. My purpose is rather to con- 
sider the suggestion which has been made of the pro- 
bable influence of foreign actors upon our stage. Some 
have thought that here is an opportunity for our young 
actors to surprise many of the secrets of the art, and to 
unlearn some of their own conventional errors. In one 
sense this is plausible ; for a young student, if at once 
gifted and modest, may undeniably learn much in the 
study of artists belonging to a wholly different school ; 



1 64 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

especially if he can discriminate what is conventional in 
them, though unlike his own conventionalism. Never- 
theless, on the whole, I think the gain likely to be small ; 
just as the gain to our painters is small if they are early 
sent to Rome to study the great masters. They become 
imitators and imitate what is conventional, or in- 
dividual mannerism. 

There is a mistake generally made respecting foreign 
actors, one, indeed, which is almost inevitable, unless 
the critic has long been familiar with the foreign stage. I 
allude to the mistake of supposing an actor to be fresh and 
original because he lias not the conventionalisms with 
which we are familiar on our own stage. He has the con- 
ventionalisms of his own. The traditions of the French, 
German, and Italian theatres thus appear to our unfamiliar 
eyes as the inventions of the actors ; just as in our youth 
we thought it deliciously comic when the rattling young 
gentleman placed his cane on the gouty old gentleman's 
toe — a bit of ' business ' which now affects us with the 
hilarity of an old Joe Miller. When Emil Devrient played 
Hamlet with the German company, both he and the 
actor who took the part of Polonius were thought by our 
old playgoers to be remarkable artists, simply because 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 165 

the ' business ' was so very novel. But any one familiar * 
with the German stage could have assured them that 
this business was almost all traditional, and could have 
pointed out the extremely mechanical style in which the 
]3arts were performed by these actors. It is true that 
English actors might have gained some hints from study- 
ing these representations ; but only by discriminating 
those elements which fitly belong to the characters from 
those which were German conventionalisms. 

Thus, I do not know that under any circumstances 
the presence of foreign actors on our stage could have 
more than the negative influence of teaching our actors 
to avoid some of their conventionalisms. It could only 
have a direct and positive influence in the case of real 
genius, which would display the futility of conven- 
tionalisms, and teach the actor to rely on sincerity of ex- 
pression. When great effects are seen to be produced 
,by the natural language of emotion, the intelligent actor 
loses his confidence in rant. 

Passing from these general considerations to the special 
case of the foreign actors now on our stage, let us ask what 
probability is there of any good influence being derived 
from such models ? Ristori is universally spoken of as the 



1 66 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

rival of Rachel : many think her superior. The difference 
between them seems to me the difference between talent 
and genius, between a woman admirable in her art, and a 
woman creative in her art. Ristori has complete mastery 
of the mechanism of the stage, but is without the inspira- 
tion necessary for great acting. A more beautiful and 
graceful woman, with a more musical voice, has seldom 
appeared ; but it is with her acting as with her voice — the 
line which separates charm from profound emotion is never 
passed. When I saw her in Lady Macbeth my disap- 
pointment was extreme : none of the qualities of a great 
actress were manifested. But she completely conquered 
me in Medea • and the conquest was all the more notice- 
able, because it triumphed over the impressions previously 
received from Robson's burlesque imitation. The exqui- 
site grace of her attitudes, the mournful beauty of her 
voice, the flash of her wrath, and the air of supreme 
distinction which seems native to her, gave a charm to 
this performance which is unforgettable. No wonder that 
people were enthusiastic about an actress who could give 
them such refined pleasure ; and no wonder that few 
paused to be very critical of her deficiencies. I missed, 
it is true, the something which Rachel had : the sudden 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 167 

splendour of creative power, the burning-point of passion ; 
yet I confess that I then thought it possible she might 
prove a more consummate comedian than Rachel, though 
so manifestly inferior to her in great moments. That 
supposition was a profound mistake. I discovered it on 
seeing Adrienne Lecouvreur the other night. The dis- 
appointment, not to say weariness, felt at this performance, 
caused me to recur to the disappointment felt at her 
Lady Macbeth : these performances marked a limit, and 
defined the range of her artistic power. In Adrienne 
there was still the lovely woman, with the air of distinction 
and the musical voice ; but except in the recitation of the 
pretty fable of the two pigeons, the passage from Phedre, 
and the one look of dawning belief brightening into 
rapture, as she is reassured by her lovers explanation, 
there was nothing in the performance which was not 
thoroughly conventional. Nor was this the worst fault. 
In the lighter scenes she was not only conventional, but 
committed that common mistake of conventional actors, 
an incongruous mixture of effects. 

Let me explain more particularly what is meant by the 
term conventional acting. When an actor feels a vivid 
sympathy with the passion, or humour, he is representing, 



168 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

he personates, i.e. speaks through the persona or character; 
and for the moment is what he represents. He can do 
this only in proportion to the vividness of his sympathy, 
and the plasticity of his organisation, which enables him 
to give expression to what he feels ; there are certain 
physical limitations in every organisation which absolutely 
prevent adequate expression of what is in the mind ; and 
thus it is that a dramatist can rarely personate one of his 
own conceptions. But within the limits which are assigned 
by nature to every artist, the success of the personation 
will depend upon the vividness of the actor's sympathy, 
and his honest reliance on the truth of his own individual 
expression, in preference to the conventional expressions 
which may be accepted on the stage. This is the great 
actor, the creative artist. The conventional artist is one 
who either, because he does not feel the vivid sympathy, 
or cannot express what he feels, or has not sufficient 
energy of self-reliance to trust frankly to his own expres- 
sions, cannot be the part, but tries to act it, and is thus 
necessarily driven to adopt those conventional means of 
expression with which the traditions of the stage abound. 
Instead of allowing a strong feeling to express itself through 
its natural signs, he seizes upon the conventional signs, 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 169 

either because in truth there is no strong feeling moving 
him, or because he is not artist enough to give it genuine 
expression ; his lips will curl, his brow wrinkle, his eyes 
be thrown up, his forehead be slapped, or he will grimace, 
rant, and ' take the stage,' in the style which has become 
traditional, but which was perhaps never seen off the stage ; 
and thus he runs through the gamut of sounds and signs 
which bear as remote an affinity to any real expressions, 
as the pantomimic conventions of ballet-dancers. 

A similar contrast is observed in literature. As there 
are occasionally actors who personate — who give expression 
to a genuine feeling — so there are occasionally writers, 
not merely litterateurs, who give expression in words to 
the actual thought which is in their minds. The writer 
uses words which are conventional signs, but he uses them 
with a sincerity and directness of individual expression 
which makes them the genuine utterance of his thoughts 
and feelings ; the litterateur uses conventional phrases, 
but he uses them without the guiding instinct of individual 
expression; he tries to express what others have expressed, 
not what is really in his own mind. With a certain skill, 
the litterateur becomes an acceptable workman ; but we 
never speak of him as a wi'itei', never estimate him as a 



170 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

man of genius, unless he can make his own soul speak to 
us. The conventional language of poetry and passion, of 
dignity and drollery, may be more or less skilfully used by 
a writer of talent ; but he never delights us with those 
words which come from the heart, never thrills us with the 
simple touches of nature — those nothings which are im- 
mense, and which make writing memorable. 

In saying thatRistori is a conventional actress, therefore,, 
I mean that with great art she employs the traditional 
conventions of the stage, and reproduces the effects which 
others have produced, but does not deeply move us, be- 
cause not herself deeply moved. Take away her beauty, 
grace, and voice, and she is an ordinary comedian 5, 
whereas Schroder, Devrient, and Pasta were assuredly 
neither handsome nor imposing in physique ; and Rachel 
made a common Jewish physiognomy lovely by mere 
force of expression. In Medea Ristori was conventional 
and admirable. In Adrienne she was conventional and 
inartistic ; for while the character was not perso7iated, but 
simulated, it was simulated by conventional signs drawn 
from a totally wrong source. The comedy was the 
comedy of a soubrette ; the playfulness had the minauderie 
of a frivolous woman, not the charm of a smile upon a 






FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 171 

serious face. It is a common mistake of conventional 
serious actors in comic scenes to imitate the ' business ' 
and manner of comic actors. The actor of serious style. 
wishing to be funny thinks he must approach the low 
comedy style, and is often vulgar, always ineffective, by his 
very efforts at being effective. Ristori might have learned 
from Rachel that the lighter scenes of Adrienne could be 
charming without once touching on the ' business ' of the 
soubrette ; and play-goers who remember Helen Faucit 
especially in parts like Rosalind (a glimpse of which was 
had the other night), will remember how perfectly that 
fine actress can represent the joyous playfulness of young 
animal spirits, without once ceasing to be poetical. The 
gaiety of a serious nature even in its excitement must, 
always preserve a certain tone which distinguishes it from 
the mirth of unimpassioned natures : a certain ground- 
swell of emotion should be felt beneath. The manner 
may be light, but it should spring from a deep nature : it 
is the difference between the comedy of Shakspeare or 
Moliere, even when most extravagant, and the comedy of 
Congreve or Scribe ; there may be a heartier laugh, but it 
has a more serious background. At any rate, the unity of 
effect which is demanded in all representation is greatly 



172 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



damaged when, as in the case of Adrienne represented by 
Ristori, instead of the playfulness of an impassioned 
woman, we have a patchwork of effects — a bit of a 
sonbrctte tacked on to a bit of the coquette, that again to 
a bit of the ingenue, and that to a tragic part. Ristori 
was not one woman in several moods, but several 
actresses playing several scenes. 

Nevertheless, while insisting on her deficiencies, I 
must repeat the expression of my admiration for Ristori 
as a distinguished actress ; if not of the highest rank, she 
is very high, in virtue of her personal gifts, and the 
trained skill with which these gifts are applied. And her 
failures are instructive. The failures of distinguished 
artists are always fruitful in suggestion. The question 
naturally arises, why is her success so great in certain 
plays, and so dubious in Shakspeare or the drama ? It 
is of little use to say that Lady Macbeth and Adrienne 
-are beyond her means ; that is only re-stating the fact ; 
can we not trace both success and failure to one source ? 
In what is called the ideal drama, constructed after the 
Greek type, she would be generally successful, because 
the simplicity of its motives and the artificiality of its 
.structure, removing it from beyond the region of 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 173 



ordinary experience, demand from the actor a correspond- 
ing artificiality. Attitudes, draperies, gestures, tones, and 
elocution which would be incongruous in a drama ap- 
proaching more nearly to the evolutions of ordinary ex- 
perience, become, in the ideal drama, artistic modes of 
expression ; and it is in these that Ristori displays a fine 
selective instinct, and a rare felicity of organisation. All 
is artificial, but then all is congruous. A noble unity 
of impression is produced. We do not demand in- 
dividual truth of character and passion ; the ideal 
sketch suffices. It is only on a smaller scale what was. 
seen upon the Greek stage, where the immensity of the- 
theatre absolutely interdicted all individualising ; spec- 
tators were content with masks and attitudes where in the 
modern drama we demand the fluctuating physiognomy 
of passion, and the minute individualities of character. 

When, however, the conventional actress descends 
from the ideal to the real drama, from the simple and 
general to the complex and individual in personation, she 
is at a disadvantage. Rachel could make this descent,, 
as all will remember who saw her Adrienne or Lady 
Tartufe ; but then Rachel personated, she spoke through 
the character, she suffered her inward feelings to express. 



174 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

themselves in outward signs ; she had not to cast about 
her for the outward signs which conventionally expressed 
■such feelings. She had but a limited range ; there were 
few parts she could play ; but those few she personated, 
those she created. I do not think that Ristori could 
personate ; she would always seek the conventional signs 
of expression, although frequently using them with con- 
summate skill. 

If what I have said is true, it is clear that the gain to 
our stage from the study of such an actress would be small. 
Her beauty, her distinction, her grace, her voice are not 
imitable ; and nowhere does she teach the actor to rely 
on natural expression. Still more is this the case with 
Fechter, an artist many degrees inferior to Ristori, yet an 
accomplished actor in his own sphere. With regard to 
Mdlle. Stella Colas, bad as our actors are, they have 
nothing to learn from her. As I said, she is very pretty, 
and has a powerful voice : but her performance of Juliet, 
which seems to delight so many honest spectators, is 
wholly without distinction. During the first two acts one 
recognises a well-taught pupil, whose byplay is very good, 
and whose youth and beauty make a pleasant scenic 
illusion. The balcony scene, though not at all represent- 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 175 

ing Shakspeare's Juliet, was a pretty and very effective bit 
of acting. It was mechanical, but skilful too. It assured 
me that she was not an actress of any spontaneity ; but it 
led me to hope more from the subsequent scenes than she 
did effect. Indeed, as the play advanced, my opinion of 
her powers sank. No sooner were the stronger emotions 
to be expressed than the mediocrity and conventionalism 
became more salient. She has great physical energy, and 
the groundlings are delighted with her displays of it ; nor 
does the monotony of her vehemence seem to weary them, 
more than the inartistic redundance of effort in the quieter 
scenes. She has not yet learned to speak a speech, but 
tries to make every line emphatic. Partly this may be due 
to the difficulty of pronouncing a foreign language ; but 
not wholly so, as is shown in the redundancy of gesture 
.and e business.' Her elocution would be very defective in 
her own language ; and its least defect, to my apprehension, 
is the imperfection of her English accent. With all her 
vehemence, she is destitute of passion ; she ' splits the 
ears of the groundlings,' but moves no human soul. Her 
looks, tones, gestures — all have the well-known melodra- 
matic unreality ; and if a British public riotously applauds 
her energetic passages, it is but justice to that public to 



1 76 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



say that it also applauds the ranting Romeo, and other 
amazing representatives of the play. 

With regard to the young actress herself about whom 
I am forced to speak thus harshly, I see so much material 
for future distinction, that I almost regret this early 
success. So much personal charm, so much energy, and 
so much ambition, may even yet carry her to the front 
ranks ; but at present, I believe that every French critic 
would be astonished at the facility with which English 
audiences have accepted his young country-woman ; and 
he would probably make some derogatory remarks upon 
our insular taste. I do not for one moment deny her 
success — I only point to its moral. The stage upon 
which such acting could be regarded as excellent is in a 
pitiable condition. It is good mob acting : charming the 
eye and stunning the ear. The audiences have for so 
long been unused to see any truer or more refined repre- 
sentation, that they may be excused if, misled by the 
public press, and the prestige attached to the young 
Frenchwoman because she is French, they go prepared 
to see something wonderful, and believe that a Juliet so 
unlike anything they have ever seen is really a remark- 
able representation. The applauders find their more 



FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. 177 

intelligent friends unwilling to admit that Mdlle. Colas is 
at present anything more than a very pretty woman, and 
peevishly exclaim, ' Hang it ! you are so difficult to 
please.' But I believe that were the stage in a more 
vigorous condition, there would be no difference of 
opinion on this point. If Mdlle. Colas finds easy ad- 
mirers, it is because, as the Spaniards say, in the kingdom 
of the blind the one-eyed is king. 



173 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



CHAPTER XII. 
THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 

As the critic's office is somewhat of a sinecure just now 
in London, the suggestion of a visit to the Paris theatres 
naturally arises in the mind of one desirous of writing 
•something about the art of acting. The present condition 
of the English drama is deplored by all lovers of the art. 
It is the more irritating, because never were theatres so 
flourishing. A variety of concurrent causes, which need 
not here be enumerated, has reduced the stage to its 
present pitiable condition. We have many theatres 
nightly crowded by an eager but uncritical public, and no 
one theatre in which a critical public can hope to enjoy 
a tolerable performance. I have a friend who maintains 
that the performances are good enough for the audiences. 
But he is cynical. Without impeaching the justice of 
his contempt, there is a restriction to be made. The 
masses crowding the theatres may, perhaps, care for 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 179 

nothing better than what is given them ; yet there is a 
smaller public — choice in its tastes, and large enough to 
support a theatre — which would eagerly welcome a fine 
actor or a well-written drama. Unhappily Art is not 
like Commerce, delicately sensitive to the laws of de- 
mand and supply. 

There is abundance of bad acting to be seen in Paris, 
ss elsewhere ; and bad acting, like bad writing, has a 
remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, 
German, Italian, or English stage : it all seems modelled 
after two or three types, and those the least like types of 
good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad 
imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation 
of a bad model. The style of expression is not simply 
conventional, the conventionality is absurdly removed 
from truth and grace. The majority have not learned to 
speak, much less to act : they mouth and gabble, look at 
the audience instead of their interlocutors, fling emphasis 
at random, mistake violence for emotion, grimace for 
humour, and express their feelings by signs as conven- 
tional and as unlike nature as the gestures of a ballet- 
dancer. Good acting, on the contrary, like good writing, 
is remarkable for its individuality. It charms by its 



180 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

truth ; and truth is always original. It has certain qualities 
which, belonging to the fundamental excellences of the 
art, are common — such as distinctness and quiet power in 
elocution, gradation in expression, and ruling calmness, 
which is never felt as coldness, but keeps the artist 
master of his effects ; yet these qualities have in each 
case the individual stamp of the actor, and seem to belong 
only to him. 

Specimens of both bad and good are to be seen in 
perfection at the Theatre Francais. Indeed, were it 
not for a few remarkable exceptions which keep up 
the traditional standard of excellence, one would fear 
that the Theatre Francais was also sinking to the level 
of general mediocrity, and that there also the art was 
dying out. Even the traditions of the stage seem de- 
parting. Elocution and deportment seem no longer 
indispensable elements. Of old there was perhaps a 
somewhat pedantic fastidiousness in these matters ; but 
the error was an error on the right side. At present the 
absence of formality is supplied by a familiarity which 
is not grace. Purity of elocution was in itself a charm, 
especially when the exquisite language of Moliere had 
to be spoken. A certain stately courtesy and elaborate 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 181 

formality suited the old comedy. The modern actors 
have become less artificial without becoming more 
natural. Tragedy ceased with Rachel. Comedy has 
still Regnier, Got, Provost, and Madame Plessy, but 
who is to replace them ? 

I saw three of Moliere's comedies, 'Georges Dandin,' 
' Tartufe,' and ' Le Mariage Force,' with the greater part 
of ■ L' Amphitryon ' ; and with the exception of Regnier, 
Provost, and Madame Plessy, saw in them nothing 
that was not either bad or mediocre. Georges Dandin 
and Sganarelle were played by M. Talbot, whom I 
saw last year in ' L'Avare,' and whose performance of 
that part excited in me the liveliest desire — to see him 
no more. That the Theatre Francais can be reduced 
to such a pass as to have no better actor for this im- 
portant class of characters is significant of the present 
condition of the stage. In London we might as well 
see Mr. Cullenford play Sir Peter Teazle. Again, for 
Tartufe we had Bressant, an excellent actor in his own 
line, but as unfit for Tartufe as Charles Mathews is for 
Iago. It was Bressant's first appearance in the part ; 
and the idea of this handsome elegant jenne premier 
playing the demure sensual hypocrite, was in itself a 



182 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

curiosity. I must do him the justice to say the cu- 
riosity was the sole emotion excited. A more complete 
failure I have seldom seen made by a good actor; 
but it was a failure from which actors might learn a 
valuable lesson, were not the lesson so often taught in 
vain : namely, the necessity of restricting themselves to 
parts for which they have the physical qualifications. 
Acting being personation, it is clear that unless ' the actor- 
has the personal qualifications requisite for the representa- 
tion of the character, no amount of ability in conceiving 
the part will avail. The Parisian critics who wrote in 
such raptures of Bressant's performance can hardly— if 
they were sincere — have understood this. 

The part of Tartufe admits of various representations.. 
Moliere has sketched the character in such broad and 
general outlines, vigorous, yet wanting in detail, that the 
actor is free to fill up these outlines in several ways, 
without endangering verisimilitude. Tartufe may be one 
of those hypocrites whose fat hands, flabby cheeks, 
oystery eyes, and unctuous manners give them an air of 
comfortable sensualism and greasy piety, very odious,, 
but very comic ; or he may be dark, saturnine, lean, lank,, 
and harsh. He may be demure and velvety in his cat- 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 



like motions, or severe with a suppressed consciousness 
of his virtue and your wickedness. He may have thin 
lips or lustful eyes, cringing humility or hard unfeelingness. 
But Bressant is by nature excluded from the presentation 
of any of these types. He did not show any indication 
of having vividly felt the character at all, and was wholly 
incompetent to present it. His appearance and manner 
were those of a handsome young curate who has com- 
mitted a forgery and cannot conceal his anxiety at the 
coming exposure. His love-making had excellent points 
if considered as the love-making of a young roue, but was 
utterly unlike the love-making of a Tartufe. When he 
says, in extenuation — 

Ah ! pour etre devot je n'en suis pas moins homme ; 
Et lorsqu'on vient a voir vos celestes appas 
Un cceur se laisse prendre et ne raisonne pas. 
Je sais qu'un tel discours de moi paroit etrange, 
Mais, madame, apres tout je ne suis pas un ange, 

he threw great persuasive fervour into his voice and 
manner, but he completely dropped the persona of 
Tartufe, and assumed that of Lovelace. Then, again,, 
when, trying to reassure Elmire, he says — 

Mais les gens comme nous brulent d'un feu discret, 
Avec qui, pour toujours, on est sur du secret, 



1 84 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

there was nothing of the oily rascality and sanctified 
security which the words demand. He promised her — 

De l'amour sans scandale et du plaisir sans peur, 
with a fervour which had no touch of hypocrisy in it. 
When he is betrayed to Orgon, and artfully confronts his 
accuser by accusing himself of being a mass of infamy 
and vice, there was no twang in his tone, no artful asser- 
tion of innocence in his manner : the comedy of the 
situation was altogether missed. 

The only actors I have seen in the part of Tartufe 
are Bocage and our Webster. Bocage was saturnine 
and sensual, Webster was catlike and sensual : both were 
forcible, both were true. Bressant was feeble, and com- 
pletely out of his element. Were it not for that strange 
ambition which prompts actors to attempt fine parts be- 
cause the parts are fine, and not because the actors have 
the requisite representative qualities, it would have been 
inexplicable that an actor like Bressant should for a 
moment have desired to play Tartufe. 

The performance of ' Tartufe,' on the whole, was by 
no means admirable. Provost, a really fine actor, was 
very humorous as Orgon, though somewhat too bour- 
geois, both in appearance and manner. Madame Plessy, 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 185 

as Elmire, spoke the verses with exquisite ease, precision, 
and grace. Hers is the perfection of elocution, highly 
elaborated, yet only seen to be elaborated by critics, who 
can also see its ease. In her one great scene, that 
in which she lures Tartufe to disclose himself, she 
was very good. But I cannot give a word of praise to 
the rest ; and considering the claims of the Theatre 
Francais, considering its reputation for producing the 
classic drama with minute attention to the ensemble, it 
seemed to me as if here also were visible the general 
signs of a decline of the art. 

The lively little comedy 'Le Mariage Force' was per- 
formed in a somewhat deadly-lively manner, except in 
the one brief scene where Regnier appears as Doctor 
Pancrace. This scene, a capital satire on the scholastic 
doctors, which everyone has enjoyed in the reading, was 
played by Regnier with a verve and a comic verisimili- 
tude perfectly delightful. His exuberance of fun never 
overstepped the line which separates comedy from farce. 
He was as extravagant as Moliere, and as true. The 
hard stupidity which comes from pre-occupation, the 
pedantic self-sufficiency, and the irritable self-love were 
shown in their most ludicrous forms. The expression of 



1 86 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



his face, when he was not listening to what Sganarelle was 
saying, but, instead of listening, seemed framing a reply 
to his antagonist, was exquisitely humorous. It was a 
flash of humour which served to clear the air, when 
weariness was beginning to whisper ' time for bed.' 

There may be two opinions respecting the perform- 
ance of the classic drama at the Theatre Frangais, there 
can be but one respecting the performance of modern 
comedy. If the traditions are dying out, if the rising 
actors are less rigorously trained or are less endowed by 
nature than were their predecessors, so that the idealism 
of dramatic art finds few successful cultivators, at any 
rate the realists are successful. To see such a perform- 
ance as that of Emile Augier's last comedy, ' Maitre 
Guerin,' revives one's faith in French acting. The 
comedy itself, like most of Augier's works, is serious 
rather than comic : the gaiety is the smile of the intellect, 
not the mirth of animal spirits, not the laugh which 
bubbles up at ludicrous images. It contains some 
admirable writing, and one or two piquant sayings. The 
interest is progressive. The characters, though faintly 
sketched, are well contracted. But the piece requires 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 187 

very fine acting, and would not bear transplantation to 
our stage. 

In the first act we are introduced to a young and 
brilliant coquette, Madame Lecoutellier, played by 
Madame Plessy, who has a rich old husband and a 
spendthrift young nephew. She likes the old man's 
money, but winces under the galling yoke of his name ;. 
nee Valtaneuse, as she delights to sign herself, she is 
forced to submit to be called Lecoutellier, which, for a 
woman of fashion with mundane instincts highly de- 
veloped, is not pleasant. Her hope is to be able to 
purchase the estate of Valtaneuse, which once belonged 
to her family, and which is now the last remnant of 
the property of M. Desroncerets, a philanthropist, who 
has squandered a fortune on his inventions, and who has 
given his daughter the absolute management of his affairs, 
so that he may be saved from ruining himself by further 
attempts at immortalising his name and enriching his 
country. The idea of this situation is an excellent one 1 
we have the passionate devotion of the old man con- 
trasted with the unusual good sense and severity of his 
daughter, forced into business habits and restrictive 
prudence, obliged to deny her father the indulgence of 



1 88 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

dreams which would be his ruin, obliged to seem hard 
and unfeminine out of her very tenderness and care for 
him. But the situation has been too imperfectly 
wrought out. It might have made the subject of a 
piece. M. Augier has made it a mere episode. 

Although Desroncerets has dispossessed himself of 
his property, no sooner does a new scheme present itself 
than he borrows money on the sly. Maitre Guerin, the 
country lawyer, is ready to purchase the estate of Val- 
taneuse (by means of a man of straw) at much less than 
its value ; and Desroncerets raises a hundred thousand 
francs in this way by a secret sale, with power to repur- 
chase at the end of a year. He has no fears of being 
unable to repurchase it — what inventor ever doubts the 
future ? — and with the money thus raised he is confident 
of earning a million. There is something sad and comic 
in the scene, which was played throughout by Got 
(Maitre Guerin) in a marvellous manner. When I first 
read the piece I was unable to detect in Maitre Guerin 
the material for a fine part : all is so faintly indicated, 
and so meagre in detail, that the actor has the whole 
onus thrown upon him of creating a part. No sooner 
did Got make his appearance than it was clear we were 






THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 



going to witness an original and powerful creation. His 
make-up, gait, look, and manner were such as would 
have thrown Balzac into ecstasies. There was no mis- 
taking the type. There was no doubt as to the intense 
individuality of that knowing, scheming, vulgar, re- 
spectable bourgeois — so prosaic, so hard, yet so respect- 
able ! The very man to be trusted and respected ; the 
man certain to get on ; certain never to offend prejudices, 
nor to overstep the limits of law. 

This Guerin has a son, a distinguished young officer, 
the soul of honour, very unlike his father, who not under- 
standing, and rather despising him, nevertheless schemes 
for his advancement, as fathers with paternal egoism will 
scheme. Louis was formerly in love with Desroncerets' 
daughter, but her business habits and attention to money 
matters chilled his enthusiasm, and he is now entangled 
in the meshes of the coquettish Madame Lecoutellier. 
The scene between these two, which closes the act, is a 
masterly bit of comedy. He comes to bid her adieu on 
his departure for Mexico. She does not wish to lose 
him, though — coquette-like — she only wants him to 
dangle after her. She insinuates that if he joins his 
regiment he cannot care for her. He pleads his honour, 



iqo ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



which forbids his changing his regiment on the eve of a 
campaign. She suggests that her husband has influence 
enough to get him promoted. He replies coldly, ' Your 
husband ! Thank you, madame, but I do not choose to 
owe my promotion to anyone but myself, least of all to 
your husband.' With an air of affected ignorance, she 
asks him, 'Why?' 'You have forbidden me to say.' 
' That's true ; and I admire the scrupulous fidelity with 
which you obey orders ! ' 'I treat the honour of others 
with the same respect as my own. You told me one 
day that to declare love to a married woman was as 
great an insult as to propose to a soldier to desert his 
standard.' 'Perhaps I exaggerated a little 1 " It is im- 
possible to conceive the finesse with which Madame 
Plessy uttered these words. Indeed, her whole perform- 
ance during this scene was enchanting. It was the 
quintessence of feminine wile. The pretty little bouderie, 
the provoking scepticism, the delicately yet plainly im- 
plied avowals, were enough to turn the head of a 
stronger man. Poor Louis of course succumbs ; carried 
away by the thought that she loves him, he passionately 
declares that he will at once quit the army. He leaves 
lier horrified at the idea. She is afraid that having: 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 191 

quitted the army for her sake, ' il se croirait des droits,' 
which is precisely what the coquette will not permit. At 
this juncture the news arrives of the sudden death of her 
husband. She writes to Louis, 'lama widow ; respect 
my year of mourning ; depart, and do not write to me.' 
She thus gains a year's delay; and 'dans un an, tout 
ceci sera de l'histoire ancienne.' 

A year has elapsed at the opening of the second act. 
In that year Desroncerets has lost all his money; 
Madame Lecoutellier and her nephew have been to law 
.about the will of the deceased Lecoutellier, and Louis 
Guerin has distinguished himself in the campaign, return- 
ing as colonel. Guerin, who finds himself on the eve of 
becoming possessor of Valtaneuse, tells his wife of his 
plans to marry Louis to Madame Lecoutellier. To 
render this possible he commences by diminishing the 
distance between the fortunes of the lady and his son. 
How ? First, by persuading her to compromise the lawsuit 
with her nephew, and divide the property. Secondly, by 
tempting her with the chateau of Valtaneuse. A very 
comic scene occurs between the aunt and nephew, in 
which Guerin tries to persuade them to divide the pro- 
perty ; an idea acceptable to both, were it not that they 



192 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

are so enraged with the aspersions of each other's advo- 
cates. Even this obstacle may be set aside, Arthur says, 
by their marrying each other. The disgust of Guerin 
at such a proposition (so subversive of all his plans) was 
excessively comic and wonderfully true. As he cannot 
openly oppose it, he resolves to frustrate it by stratagem. 
When she departs he pretends that she has dropped a 
letter. This letter is the one written to her by Louis a 
year before, but never delivered. It rouses Arthur's 
jealousy, as Guerin intended. 

The third act is somewhat weaker than the others. 
The upshot of it is that Gue'rin proposes to Madame 
Lecoutellier that she should marry Louis, and thus 
become mistress of Valtaneuse, which he is about to 
possess. She consents. In the fourth act Desroncerets, 
unable to raise or borrow money, applies to his daughter 
for funds. She refuses. A powerful scene (very in- 
differently acted) occurs here, in which the loving 
daughter is forced to seem harsh, forced to disobey her 
father, forced at length to confess that he has spent all 
his money, and that for the last three years they have 
been living on her dowry. 

The secret once disclosed, Louis, who turned from 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 193 

her because he thought her mercenary, now turns back 
again repentant to her feet. But he discovers the plan 
by which her father will be deprived of his only resource, 
the chateau of Valtaneuse. His sense of honour is 
justly outraged at such an act, and he feels called upon 
to prevent it. He does prevent it — pays back the 
money ; maddens his father, who disinherits him ; and 
marries Francine Desroncerets, The final scene of 
quarrel is very dramatic. Guerin is utterly baffled, and 
his rage is tragi-comical. Even his wife deserts him \ 
she who, for five-and-thirty years, has been his patient 
victim, now raises her head, and declares her purpose 
of quitting the house with her son. The author has not 
sufficiently prepared this — indeed, it is in contradiction 
with the spirit and language of the earlier scenes in 
which Madame Guerin speaks of her husband as the best 
of men, and seems devoted to him ; nevertheless, it is a 
powerful dramatic incident ; and when Guerin is left 
solitary, the solitude of selfishness is vividly indicated by 
his being reduced to ask the man of straw to stay and 
dine with him. 

Nothing could be more natural or more suggestive 
than Got's acting of this part. From first to last it was 

o 



194 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

a study ; and I can give our actors no better advice 
than to read the play, picture to themselves how they 
would perform the part of Guerin, and then go to Paris 
and carefully watch Got. Such acting is worth the study 
of every artist, no matter what his line, because it 
exhibits vividly the singular effect which is produced by 
truthfulness. Every gesture, every look, every tone of 
the actor, seems instinct with the bourgeois nature. 
The way he uses his handkerchief, the way he sits down, 
the smallest detail, is prompted by an inward vision of 
the nature of the man represented. Then, again, 
Madame Plessy, though, as a woman, without much 
charm, as an artist is well worth studying, not only be- 
cause of the refined naturalness of her manner, but also 
on account of the exquisite skill of her elocution. 

The great difficulty in elocution is to be slow, and not 
to seem slow. To speak the phrases with such dis- 
tinctness, and such management of the breath, that each 
shall tell, yet due proportion be maintained. Hurry 
destroys the effect ; and actors hurry, because they 
dread, and justly dread, the heaviness of a slow utterance. 
The art is so to manage the time that it shall not appear 
slow to the hearer ; and this is an art very rarely under- 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 195 

stood by actors. No sooner have they to express excite- 
ment or emotion of any kind than they seem to lose all 
mastery over the rhythm and cadence of their speech. 1 
Let them study great speakers, and they will find that in 
passages which seem rapid there is a measured rhythm, 
and that even in the whirlwind of passion there is as 
strict a regard to tempo as in passionate music. Resistent 
flexibility is the perfection of elocution. 

Comedy nobly justifies its existence when it dignifies 
amusement with a healthy, moral tendency, carrying a 
lesson in its laugh, a warning in its pictures. Too often 
the comedy of our day holds itself aloof from the realities 
of life, and seeks amusement in the fantastic combination 
of incidents and characters which have only a distant 

1 Sanson, the excellent professor of elocution, tells us how — 

d'un mot plaisant, terrible, ou tendre 
On double la valeur en le faisant attendre ; 

a point well understood by the elder Kean, who, however, often 
allowed his pauses to degenerate into tricks. Sanson adds : 

Tantot 1' agile voix se precipite et vole ; 
Tantot il faut savoir ralentir sa parole. 
Ignorant de son art les plus vulgaires lois 
Plus d'un acteur se laisse entrainer par sa voix ; 
Sa rapide parole etourdit l'auditoire : 
11 semble concourir pour unprix de memoir e. 

O 2 



196 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

reference to the on-goings of society. Hence the 
common phrase, ' that is all very well on the stage : ' 
thus the satire becomes harmless because felt to be 
fantastic ; the moral is sterile because inapplicable. 

In the comedy — or shall I not rather call it tragedy ? — 
of ' Les Lionnes Pauvres,' by Emile Augier and E. Foussier, 
which was revived at the 'Vaudeville' recently, and 
which, though wretchedly performed, was terribly affect- 
ing, the authors have shown us what comedy may be — 
should be. They have boldly laid bare one of the 
hideous sores of social life, and painted the conse- 
quences of the present rage for dress and luxury which is 
rapidly demoralising the middle classes of Europe. No 
one who knows how severe is the struggle of families 
having small and fixed incomes, can contemplate without 
dismay the tendency of all classes to imitate the extrava- 
gance of the classes above them. What Goethe humor- 
ously says of literary aspirants, that no one is contented 
to be a cobbler, every one pretending to be a poet — 

Niemand will ein Schuster seyn j 
Jedermann einDichter — 

is true of social aspirants. We all belong to the aristo- 
cracy. If we cannot ride in our own carriages, we can 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 197 

wear dresses only meant to be worn in a carriage. 
If we cannot delude our friends into the belief that we 
are rich, we will do our best to delude strangers in the 
street. We may not be duchesses, but we will dress as 
like them as our means and imitations will permit. The 
crinoline disease corrupts all classes. The wife of a 
clerk whose salary is four pounds a week sweeps the dirt 
of the pavement with her silken train, and is neither dis- 
mayed by the uncleanliness nor ashamed of the extrava- 
gance : if anyone mildly remonstrates on this wicked 
waste, she quietly answers, ' They are worn so ! ' Such 
extravagance can only be supported by debts which end 
in dishonour, or by a pinching economy at home. The 
necessaries are sacrificed to the vanities. The husband 
and children suffer, that the wife and mother may ' make a 
figure' — which she doesn't. In Italy and France one 
hears it universally said that wives purchase their toil- 
ettes with the honour of their husbands. In England. 
such an accusation would be indignantly repelled. 
Meanwhile even in England the excess of expenditure 
must be made up by a corresponding deficiency some- 
where. ' In France,' say our authors, as long ' as the 
wife remains virtuous, the husband pays twopence for a 



198 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

penny loaf. Then comes the time when he pays a penny 
for a twopenny loaf. She begins by robbing and ends 
by enriching the house.' The husband is hoodwinked. 
He is in a state of chronic amazement at the progress of 
manufactures, the cheapness of silks, the marvels of 
' bargains ' that are to be had by those who will spend 
one-half of their time in contriving their toilettes, and 
the other half in exhibiting them. He never suspects 
where all this splendour comes from, until he opens his 
eyes to his dishonour. 

In ' Les Lionnes Pauvres ' this danger and this vice are 
painted with a firm, remorseless hand. Unhappily, the 
details are some of them such as would scarcely be 
tolerated on our stricter stage : but with that exception 
the comedy is worthy of the highest praise. It is badly 
acted by everyone except Felix, who plays the part of 
moral censor with charming ease and incisive effect. 
His art of branding vice with an epigram, and of uttering 
a moral while never for one moment committing the mis- 
take of assuming the air of sermonising superiority, could 
not be surpassed. The laughter left behind it a serious 
reflection. Take Felix away, however, and the perform- 
ance is one which must make every Englishman pause 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 199 

to consider the justice of the popular opinion that the 
French stage is greatly superior to the English in the 
perfection of its ensemble. Indeed, that opinion seems to 
me to require revision. I do not speak of the Vaude- 
ville only, but of the theatres in general. There are 
good actors, admirable actors, on the French stage ; but 
a really good ensemble I saw but at one theatre — the 
Porte St. Martin — where the 'Vingt Ans Apres' of 
Dumas was played by Melingue, Clarence, Lacressoniere, 
Montal, and Mdlle. Duverger, in the principal parts, and 
very tolerable actors in the subordinate parts, presenting 
a combination such as we can make no claim to, and 
such as I did not see elsewhere rivalled. It will, of 
course, be understood that I do not place the Theatre 
Frangais below the Porte St. Martin in absolute, but in 
relative merit. There are far better actors at the Theatre 
Francais ; and in • Maitre Guenn ' the ensemble was satis- 
factory. But the standard of that theatre is, in all 
respects, higher ; and in the performance of the classic 
drama it is certainly inferior to the performance of melo- 
drama at the Porte St. Martin. 

Altogether, my visit to this Boulevard theatre was 
very gratifying, and I could not help thinking what a 



200 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

gain it would be to our actors if they would go there and 
study the art. They would see that it was by no means 
necessary to outrage nature for the sake of effect ; and 
that in the important matter of management of the voice 
much might be learned, especially that the simple in- 
flexions of natural utterance were far more telling than 
the growls of the voix de ventre, or the surprising mouth- 
ings which with us are mistaken for effective elocution. 
They would also see that attention to the business of 
the scenes could be given without thrusting themselves 
forward and overdoing their parts. 

Not that these Porte St. Martin actors are irreproach- 
able. By no means. They, too, have their convention- 
alities and their shortcomings. But if they fall short of 
a high standard, they are, compared with what we are 
accustomed to see in England, simple, natural, and ex- 
cellent. One of them I am tempted to single out, partly 
because of the rare qualities of his performance, and 
partly because, being a young actor who has not yet 
made a reputation, his name does not figure in large type 
beside that of Melingue, Clarence, and Lacressoniere. 
It is no exaggeration to say that to see this young man, 
Montal, play the part of Mordaunt in ' Vingt Ans Apres/ 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 201 

is worth a journey to Paris for any actor who is bent on 
mastering some of the secrets of his art. On his very 
first appearance, as he stood silent in the background, 
there was no mistaking that an impressive actor was 
before us. He had the rare power of being silently 
eloquent ; of standing quite still and yet riveting attention 
on him. I knew not who he was, and had never seen the 
play, yet felt at once that in the pale young monk standing 
on the stairs at the back of the stage, there was something 
boding and fateful. Much of this, of course, was due to 
the physique of the actor \ but even actors who had no 
such nervous temperament and sharply- cut features might 
imitate the quietness and significance of his gestures. As 
the play proceeded, it became evident that his range of 
expression was limited, and that he could not adequately 
represent emotion in its higher forms ; but terror, sarcasm, 
sombre scheming, and serpentine adroitness, were ad- 
mirably expressed by him. So effective were his make- 
up, gestures, looks, and manners, that on quitting the 
theatre, and for many days afterwards, my imagination was 
haunted by the vision. 

The heroine was played by Mdlle. Du verger, interest- 
ing to me as the actress whom it was understood we 



202 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

were shortly to see on the London boards, in accordance 
with that surprising fashion of importing foreigners which 
the success of Fechter has introduced. The fashion is 
not complimentary to our public taste. Is it that we 
have been so tolerant of laxity in the matter of elocution, 
and have shown so little fastidiousness as to how our 
noble language was spoken, that managers believed we 
should not wince at the strange caprices of foreign accent 
and rhythm? A few years ago the public would not 
accept Miss Smithson (now Madame Berlioz) because of 
her Irish accent ; yet Fechter, Mdlle. Stella Collas, and 
Mdlle. Beatrice have found enthusiastic admirers. In a 
little while we may rival even the Germans in endurance. 
They listened without protest to the negro actor, Aldridge, 
declaiming ' Othello ' in English, while all the other cha- 
racters spoke German. And the Germans, we constantly 
hear, are ' a nation of critics ! ' 

As we were to have Mdlle. Duverger in England, I 
watched her performance with some curiosity. One ex- 
cellent quality she undoubtedly has : fine eyes. If you 
ask me, What are her talents as an actress ? my answer is, 
She has fine eyes. A pretty woman has always the talent 
of being pretty; and the mass of playgoers in our day 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 203 

demand little more. How Mdlle. Duverger may manage 
to fill certain parts with beauty and costume we must wait 
to see ; but of this much I am assured by the one per- 
formance I witnessed, that, as an actress, she is thoroughly 
conventional, and not impressive in her conventionality. 



I have been instructing myself in Christian mythology 
as presented on the French stage. Not even the heat nor 
the tumult of a popular theatre could keep me from 
1 Paradise Lost y at the Gaite ; the attraction of the Fall 
of the Angels, Pandemonium, Adam and Eve, the death 
of Abel, the children of Cain, and the Deluge, was irre- 
sistible. You can with ease imagine the kind of boulevard 
poetry and religious sentiment, unpen fort de cafe, which a 
melodramatic spectacle on this theme would produce ; 
but there were points in the performance which you could 
not have imagined — at least, which I could not — and that 
serves the turn of my sentence quite as well. You may 
have pictured to yourself the rebel angels personated by 
a dozen supers in dresses of no particular period ; you 
may have imagined a stout ballet-girl in very scant clothing 
representing Eve; a well-shaved Adam in skins and 



204 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

fleshings ; and a Cain with hair and beard trimmed in the 
latest style ; but I deny that you could have conceived a 
Satan so jovial and grotesque, — such a compound of 
Falstaff turned acrobat, and a First Murderer dreaming of 
1 leading business ' ! It is no exaggeration to say that I 
was quite haunted all yesterday by the vision of that fat 
man in scaly costume representing the Serpent, a tempter 
with the sort of fat elasticity of bearing which we some- 
times observe in the French Banting— ' caught young.' 
What the authors had put into his mouth was sufficiently 
grotesque and eminently French, especially where Satan 
makes love to Eve, and, on being repulsed by that 
matron, kneels at her feet and weeps in the approved 
style : ' Satan a tes pieds ! Satan pleure ! ' says the 
tempter — as if that must be irresistible ! 

The audience seemed intensely interested, not only in 
this love-making, but in every other scene of the great 
mythic drama ; and when Eve tries to awaken the better 
feelings of Cain, and appeals to him as a bourgeoise mother 
would appeal to her refractory son (on the stage), recalling 
the early years of maternal solicitude and maternal anguish, 
the women around me were incessantly wiping their eyes, 
and the men before me were deeply interested. There 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 205 

were, indeed, a few sceptical young men who seemed only 
impressed by the ludicrous aspect of the actors or the 
scenes. But the mass of the audience evidently accepted 
this mystery-play of the nineteenth century with as much 
seriousness as their ancestors in the fourteenth century 
accepted the naive representations of Biblical stories which 
their priests furnished in good faith. And this constituted 
the real interest of the performance to me. This was one 
of the points which I had not been prepared for. Yet 
while I saw the seriousness of the people in presence of a 
singularly vulgar and unimaginative reproduction of one 
of the grand stories of human destiny, and thought of the 
shock such a presentation would give to the feelings of 
Protestants in what they would irresistibly feel to be a 
degradation of the mysteries of religion, I could not help 
recognising that the Catholic audience, especially the lower 
classes, would have been so prepared from infancy by what 
they daily saw in their churches and cathedrals, that the 
idea of any irreverence or of any vulgarisation would not 
occur to them. After the images they had worshipped 
from childhood, the aspect of the Angel Michael, with a 
flaming sword and superb wings, announcing to Satan that 
the Creator had just endowed the universe with the earth, 



206 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

delicieux sejour, as he said, for the new favourite, Man, the 
stage must have seemed the more imposing of the two. 
And, probably, their imaginations of the flight of Cain had 
never pictured anything so picturesquely awful as the 
tableaux which here reproduced on a large scale the picture 
by Prudhon one does not admire in the gallery of the 
Louvre. 

It was not for the acting that I went to the Ga'ite. I 
had seen Dumaine, the hero of this house, as N. T. Hicks 
used to be of the transpontine theatres, and did not antici- 
pate that his performance of Satan would be striking, 
though it proved, as I said, immensely droll. But I did 
expect that Montal would have made something of Cain. 
Montal some months ago played the villain in 'Vingt 
Ans Apres,' and made one feel before he spoke that he 
was an evil influence ; I was therefore curious to see him 
in another kind of part. Alas ! as Cain he showed no 
good quality. It was an ungrateful part to play, and he 
played it ungratefully. He was violent, ill at ease, con- 
ventional. But he was surpassed in badness by Clarence, 
who used to be an excellent jeune premier, and who 
as Adam gave a ludicrous illustration of what the coat- 
and-waistccat style of acting comes to when it has to 
deal with anything more elevated. 






THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 207 

Yet the effect of the story, so impressive in its religious 
associations, and so interesting to the universal heart in 
its human suggestions, aided by a splendid spectacle, has 
made this very prosaic and absurd piece, in spite of the 
acting, one of the great successes of the year. The house 
is crowded every night. With us the Lord Chamberlain 
would not even permit the title to appear on the bills ; and 
even if there were no licenser of plays, the public would 
tear up the benches at the opening scene of the fall of the 
Angels, so profound would be the agitation of horror at the 
sight of what would seem this daring desecration of things 
sacred. To the French it is anything but blasphemous ; 
and we make a great mistake in supposing that there is 
not as much good honest religious feeling in France as in 
England, though it may take a different shape. 

To this account I will add the notice of a professedly 
religious performance of a dramatic kind, given not in 
Paris, but in Antwerp. The contrast is as great as might 
be expected from the two cities. 

Antwerp is delightful by day when the churches are 
open and the gallery is to be enjoyed ; but Antwerp at 
night, after you have well explored its streets and know 



2oS ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

its architecture, is not an eminently amusing city. There 
are men who can sit in a cafe, or smoke and dawdle 
through the post-prandial hours, and be content. I am 
less easily contented, and whenever I am away from my 
own hearthrug, the shades of evening bring with them 
a restless desire for music or dramatic entertainment. 
At Antwerp there was nothing of the kind. Not even 
my desire for amusement could be cheated with the 
dreary performance of an equestrian troop, foreseen to be 
a spectacle of bony women jumping through hoops, and 
hideous men vaulting on and off horses, to the sounds of 
a most brassy band. I preferred the hotel. 

What, then, was my agitation of delight when, rest- 
lessly reading everything like a placard which promised 
performance of one thing or another, I came upon a huge 
bill, headed ' Theatre des Varie'tes,' setting forth that a 
performance of the Ober Ammergau mystery-play on the 
Life and Death of our Saviour would take place on the 
Sunday? A theatre seemed a strange place for this 
religious performance (Groote Godsdienstige Voorstell- 
ing), and I had always imagined that the Ober Am- 
mergau peasants performed in the open air. Neverthe- 
less the chance of seeing this spectacle — the last lingering 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 209 

remains of the mediaeval drama, when plays were played 
in churches, and the actors were priests — was so exciting 
that I rushed off immediately after breakfast to secure 
places, without any regard to congruity. 

Such a performance was indeed in all respects excep- 
tional. A dingy little theatre, where one would expect 
to see broad farces and bloody melodrames, was to be 
the scene of a mimic representation of the most solemn 
and affecting of stories — a story so sacred that to Protes- 
tant feeling there is something shocking in the idea of 
its being brought into the remotest relation with any- 
thing like amusement, especially theatrical amusement. 
And, nevertheless, I believe that any Protestant who 
could have overcome the first repulsion would have 
witnessed the performance not only with deep interest 
but with the acknowledgment that it was really religious. 
Certain it is that on the Catholic audience assembled 
there the effect was purely that of religious awe and sym- 
pathetic interest. I am sorry to be obliged to add that 
the effect was transitory. Each scene was witnessed with 
hushed and engrossed attention ; but as the curtain fell 
the spectators relapsed into gabble, laughter, and eat- 
ables, as if they were indeed ' at the play.' This rather 

p 



210 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

irritated me at the time ; but now I bethink me that good 
Protestants may be seen coming out of church after 
listening to a most edifying discourse respecting the next 
world, and yet be chattering about the affairs of this 
world with lively levity. 

Now as to the performance. It represented, in 
eighteen tableaux vivants, the most symbolic incidents 
in the sacred life, from the Nativity to the Resurrection. 
There being only pantomimic action, and no speaking, 
the dangers of vulgarisation or of ludicrous suggestion 
were avoided. The organ played during each scene and 
helped to deepen the impression. The stage was arrayed 
with black baize at the wings and back, thus forming 
a dark background against which the figures stood in 
relief. Occasionally a tree or seat occupied the fore- 
ground. The dresses were such as one usually sees in 
small provincial theatres, and the wigs and beards were 
especially rude. At first I feared the performance was 
going to be painfully childish in its attempts at illusion ; 
for in the ' Adoration of the Shepherds ' there was a large 
doll lamb which baa'd when the boy pulled down its head 
— an attempt at realism which promised ill for what was 
to come. The pretty picture which followed — ? The 



THE DRAMA IN PARIS. 1865. 211 

Flight into Egypt ' — showed us Mary on a pasteboard 
donkey, with the infant in her arms ; and the child had 
been taught to open his arms and bless the world, and to 
kiss his mother, with very touching simplicity. After this 
the performance was really remarkable in as far as it de- 
pended on the Christ — a tall and very handsome man, 
with noble and gentle bearing, who is said to prepare 
himself for the performance by weeks of prayer and medi- 
tation, and to suffer greatly from exhaustion when the 
excitement of acting is over. The others were all as bad 
as bad could be ; but he was affecting. The adieu to 
his mother and friends at Bethany, the agony in the 
garden, the bearing of the cross, and meeting with Ve- 
ronica, tasked his powers of mimic expression severely, 
and showed him to be in earnest or to be a great artist. 
The shudder of horror which ran through the house when 
the soldier smote him on the cheek proved how thorough 
was the imaginative belief of the audience. Never once 
throughout the long and varied scenes did he ' drop the 
mask,' and pass out of the character he had assumed. 
His action was fluent and unconventional, his face highly 
and variously expressive. 

Many of the tableaux were imitated from celebrated 



212 ON ACTGRS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

pictures. Leonardo da Vinci of course was followed in 
the ' Last Supper.' The ' Descent from the Cross ' was 
copied from Rubens ; the entombment and resurrection 
from various old pictures ; the denial of Peter was ex- 
cellently managed, but I could not recall any especial 
original for it. 

On the whole, I came away satisfied that the effect of 
such performances was wholly beneficial. The common 
mind can only be impressed by visible symbols ; and 
when these symbols are associated with primitive emo- 
tions, their influence is religious. Nothing can be more 
unlike this ' Godsdienstige Voorstelling ' than the auda- 
cious spectacle of ' Le Paradis Perdu,' where Satan made 
love to Eve in the style of a French novelist, and Eve 
had the most painful resemblance to a ballet-girl. Here 
at Antwerp, if a critical taste would have found many 
things to alter, it would have found none that were even 
remotely injurious to the public mind. Had the audience 
showed a little hypocrisy, and pretended that the per- 
formance had not only deeply moved them but had solem- 
nised their thoughts for a while, I should have been 
wholly pleased ; but the audience, to their credit be it 
said, had no thought of pretence in the matter. 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 213 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 

The Drama is everywhere in Europe and America rapidly 
passing from an Art into an Amusement ; just as of old it 
passed from a religious ceremony into an Art. Those who 
love the Drama cannot but regret the change, but all 
must fear that it is inevitable when they reflect that the 
stage is no longer the amusement of the cultured few, 
but the amusement of the uncultured and miscultured 
masses, and has to provide larger and lower appetites 
with food. For one playgoer who can appreciate the 
beauty of a verse, the delicate humour of a conception, 
or the exquisite adaptation of means to ends which gives 
ease and harmony to a work of art, there are hundreds 
who, insensible to such delights, can appreciate a parody, 
detect a pun, applaud a claptrap phrase of sentiment, and 
be exhilarated by a jingle and a dance ; for one who can 
recognise, and, recognising, can receive exquisite pleasure 



214 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

from, fine acting, thousands can appreciate costumes, 
bare necks, and ' powerful ' grimace ; thus the mass 
easily pleased and liberally paying for the pleasure, rules 
the hour. 

Unless a frank recognition of this inevitable tendency 
cause a decided separation of the drama which aims at 
Art from those theatrical performances which only aim at 
Amusement of a lower kind (just as classical music keeps 
aloof from all contact and all rivalry w r ith comic songs 
and sentimental ballads), and unless this separation take 
place in a decisive restriction of one or more theatres to 
the special performances of comedy and the poetic 
drama, the final disappearance of the art is near at hand. 
It may be a question whether any capital in Europe 
^ould now sustain a theatre appealing only to the intel- 
lectual classes ; and it may also be a question whether 
dramatists and actors could be found competent and 
willing to supply the art, could the audiences be secured. 
I do not venture to answer these questions : the more so 
because I am" not insensible to the many and serious 
obstacles in the way of establishing such a theatre ; but 
considering the really large numbers of cultivated minds, 
and the fascination to all minds of dramatic representa- 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 215 

tion ; considering further the pecuniary success of the 
Monday Popular Concerts in a city which tolerates 
German brass bands and resounds with nigger melodies, 
it is no extravagant hope that audiences might be found 
if adequate performances were offered. Not perhaps the 
crowds which enable a * sensation piece ' to run two hun- 
dred nights 1 or a burlesque to make the fortune of a 
theatre ; but it should be remembered that if the audiences 
would be less numerous, the expenses of the theatre 
would also be proportionately small. It is only by a 
rigid adherence to the principle of specialisation that 
such a scheme could have a chance. The theatre must 
be mounted with the sole purpose of performing works of 
art, for an art-loving public. It must avoid spectacle, 
scenic ' effects,' and encroachments on the domains of 
melodrama and burlesque ; as quartet concerts avoid the 
attractions of military bands and comic songs. It must 
have one small company of well-trained and art-loving 
actors [what a condition !], not a large miscellaneous 
company attempting all kinds of performance. 

Something like what is here indicated may be found 

1 Since then ' The School for Scandal ' has run for 200 nights, 
and ' Hamlet ' also for 200 nights. 



216 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

in the Theatre Francais of Paris, and the Hof Theater 
in each of the German capitals. To be candid, one 
must add that none of these establishments are able to 
dispense with Government assistance : they are not 
paying speculations ; and if examination or experiment 
should prove that in the nature of the case such esta- 
blishments could not be made to pay— if there is in 
England really no public large enough to support such 
an undertaking well managed — then we have nothing but 
to resign ourselves to the inevitable destruction of the 
drama ; for certainly no English Government would ever 
think of contributing a penny towards the elevation or 
the preservation of dramatic art. 

In the course of a few weeks' ramble in Germany this 
summer I had but rare opportunities of ascertaining the 
present condition of the dramatic art, although during 
the last thirty years I have from time to time been fortu- 
nate enough to see most of the best actors Germany has 
produced. Now, as of old, there is a real respect for the 
art, both in the public and in the actors ; and at each 
theatre we see that striving after an ensemble so essential 
to the maintenance of the art, but which everywhere else 
except at the Theatre Francais is sacrificed to the detes- 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 217 

table star system. In Germany we may see actors of the 
first eminence playing parts which in England and 
America would be contemptuously rejected by actors of 
third-rate rank ; and the ' condescension,' so far from 
lowering the favourite in the eyes of the public, helps to 
increase his favour. I remember when Emil Devrient, 
then a young mau, came to play Hamlet at Berlin, as a 
'guest,' the great tragedian Seydelmann (the only great 
tragedian in my opinion that Germany has had during 
the last quarter of a century l ) undertook the part of 
Polonius. It was one of those memorable performances 
which mark an epoch in the playgoer's life. Such a 
revelation of the character, and such maestria of execu- 
tion, one can hardly hope to see again. Had he played 
Laertes (and he would doubtless have consented to 
play it had there been any advantage in his doing so), 
he would still have been the foremost figure of the piece. 
At any rate he would have been the great actor, and the 
favourite of the Berliners. 

And here it is only fair to add in extenuation of the 
English actor's resistance against sacrificing his amour 

1 Mr. Schiitz Wilson has just published an interesting ' Glance 
at the German Stage,' in which there is a sketch of Seydelmann. 



218 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

firopre to the general good, that if he obstinately declines 
to appear in a part unworthy of his powers or his rank in 
the profession, he does so because, over and above the 
natural dislike of appearing to some disadvantage, he 
knows in the first place that the English public cares little 
for an e7isemble, and in the second place that the majority 
of the audience will only see him in that unworthy part, 
and consequently will form an erroneous idea of his capa- 
bilities. It is otherwise with the German actor. He 
knows that the public expects and cares for an ensemble, 
and he desires the general success of the performance, as 
each individual in an orchestra desires that the orchestral 
effect should be perfect. He knows, moreover, that the 
same people who to-night see him in an inferior part saw 
him last week, or will see him next week, in the very best 
parts of his repertory. He has, therefore, little to lose 
and much to gain by playing well an inferior part. 
Further, his payment is usually regulated by the times of 
performance. 

Be the reasons what they may, the result is that 
always at a German Hof Theater one is sure of the very 
best ensemble that the company can present; and one 
will often receive as much pleasure from the performance 






THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 219 

of quite insignificant parts as from the leading parts 
on other stages. The actors are thoroughly framed : 
they know the principles of their art — a very different 
thing from knowing ' the business ' ! They pay laudable 
attention to one supremely important point recklessly 
disregarded on our stage, namely elocution. They know 
how to speak — both verse and prose : to speak without 
mouthing, yet with effective cadence ; speech elevated 
above the tone of conversation without being stilted. 
How many actors are there on our stage who have learned 
this ? How many are there who suspect the mysterious 
charm which lies in rhythm, and have mastered its music? 
How many are there who, with an art which is not ap- 
parent except to the very critical ear, can manage the 
cadences and emphases of prose, so as to be at once 
perfectly easy, natural, yet incisive and effective ? The 
foreigner, whose ear has been somewhat lacerated by the 
dreadful intonations of common German speech, is sur- 
prised to find how rich and pleasant the language is 
when spoken on the stage; the truth being that the 
actors have learned to speak, and are not permitted to 
call themselves actors at a Hof Theater until they have 
conquered those slovenly and discordant intonations 



220 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

which distort the speech of vulgar men. I was made 
more than ever sensible of this refinement ' of elocution 
by having passed some weeks in a retired watering-place 
wholly inhabited by Germans of the tradesman class, 
whose voices and intonations so tormented me that I 
began to think the most hideous sound in nature was 
the cackle of half-a-dozen German women. To hear the 
women on the stage after that was like hearing singing 
after a sermon. 

Next to excellence of elocution, which forms the 
basis of good acting, comes the excellence of miming^— 
the expression of character. There are three great divi- 
sions of mimetic art : first, the ideal and passionate ; 
secondly, the humorous realism of comedy ; and lastly, 
the humorous idealism of farce. In the first and last 
divisions the German stage seems poorly supplied at 
present. But in the second division there is much excel- 
lence. And I remember this to have been always the 
case : tragic or poetic actors are rare, their power over 
the emotions fitful, but comic actors are abundant, though 
seldom successful in the riotously and fantastically hu- 
morous. Now precisely in this division, wherein 
Germany displays greatest power, England has at all 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 221 

times been most feeble. There has, indeed, of late 
years, arisen a certain ambition on the part of actors, and 
a demand on the part of certain audiences, which may 
be said to be leading our drama into the region of humor- 
ous realism and high comedy; nor is it without signifi- 
cance that this movement should have been coincident 
with an almost complete extinction of the passionate 
and ideal drama ; but without making invidious mention 
of a few exceptions, it is simple justice to say that the 
efforts of our stage in this direction are but trivial beside 
the German, and men with us gain a reputation as 
' natural actors ' for mimetic qualities which would be 
quite ordinary in Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, or Weimar. 

One excellence noticeable on the German stage is the 
presentation of Character in its individual traits, with just 
that amount of accentuation which suffices to make it 
incisive and laughable, yet restrains it from running over 
into extravagance and unreality. The performance at 
Berlin of a French comedy, c The Secret Agent/ was an 
example. 

The piece itself is lively and pleasant, with no emi- 
nent qualities, and happily without any French poison — 
sentimental or sensual. A young German duke has come 



222 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

to the throne, but not to the seat of government — there 
he finds his mother firmly and pathetically seated ; 
governing in his name, and for him, with a despotism 
which he cannot mitigate, and with a love of power 
which he cannot cheat. The Duchess is one of those 
terrible women who, with the softest manners and the 
most benevolent intentions, insist on a despotic carrying 
out of all their schemes, and who, representing them- 
selves as on the brink of the grave, throw the responsi- 
bility on their contradictors of the fatal consequences 
which may ensue from a contradiction. She wields the 
sceptre, and whenever her son attempts to argue with 
her, whenever he shows the least sign of resistance, her 
' failing health and shattered nerves ' are invoked ; she 
retires behind them, as the goddess in Homer takes 
refuge in a cloud. The whole play is an exhibition of 
court life and the petty struggle for power. 

It was represented with a verisimilitude perfectly 
charming — not simply in the close adherence to external 
forms, so that one felt oneself at a German Court ; but 
also in the easy naturalness of demeanour and unforced 
truth of mimetic expression, which kept up our illusion 
of witnessing real events and real people. This is more 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 223 

particularly true of the actress who played the Grand 
Duchess — Frau Fried-Blumauer — and the actor who 
played the Oberhofmeister — Herr Doring. All the 
performers were quiet and acceptable, but these two were 
supremely artistic. 

Those who remember Mrs. Glover, and can imagine 
her rare and unctuous humour added to the refinement 
of Madame Plessy, may form a conception of Frau 
Fried-Blumauer's presentation of the pathetic and digni- 
fied despot. A quiet regal manner, a subdued but most 
significant emphasis, a gentle imperiousness which 
apparently never dreamed of a possible resistance, a 
delicate inflexion of voice, and wonderful play of feature 
and of hands, kept us in a state of constant delight, as 
touch after touch gave fulness of life to the admirable 
picture. In a part so easily lending itself to caricature 
as that of a woman falling back upon her ' shattered 
nerves,' Frau Fried-Blumauer never approached ex- 
aggeration by look or tone, and yet gave every detail 
such unobtrusive relief that not a look or tone passed 
unobserved. Her elocution was a study. The droop- 
ing of her eyelids and the play of hands gave surprising 
point to very commonplace remarks. Not that she ever 



224 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

made what our actors call 'a point.' There was nothing 
to 'draw the house down.' I do not remember that 
there was one burst of laughter. But she never was on 
the stage without usurping everyone's attention, and 
from first to last she kept us fluttering with the thrills of 
pleasure which follow the recognition of artistic truth. I 
have since been informed that she is as great in low 
comedy as in this, the highest comedy, and that she is 
mistress of all the dialects. Strange as it may seem that 
this artist, so remarkable for elegance and delicate nuance, 
should also be great in low comedy, I can believe it, for 
she seemed artist enough for anything not beyond the 
sphere of her physical organisation. At any rate, there 
can be no hesitation in affirming that the Berlin stage 
possesses an actress of high comedy such as nothing on 
our stage (since Mrs. Glover) can in any way approach. 

Very remarkable also was the performance of Herr 
Doring. Thirteen years ago I used to see him play 
Iago, Shylock, Nathan der Weise, and parts of that class. 
It was only by reference to the playbill that I could 
persuade myself that the humorous and very old master 
of the ceremonies was the same Herr Doring ■ and, as a 
testimony to the truth of his acting, it may be added 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 225 

that, although not inexperienced in such matters, I was 
wholly at a loss to guess how much of the age of his 
aspect and manner might be reality and how much mask. 
His face was old, his voice was old, his back was old, his 
legs were old. And as thirteen years may bring enor- 
mous changes (say from sixty to seventy-three), in my 
ignorance of what his age might have been when I saw 
his Iago and Shylock, it was a puzzle to me to form a 
notion of the degree in which nature assisted art in this 
very truthful and very droll representation of an old man. 
Although actors rightly take advantage of every physical 
peculiarity, youthful or aged, which the better enables 
them to represent a character, and the audience only 
cares for the representation, not for the means employed, 
there is nevertheless an increased enjoyment when art is 
known to be creating the very means. We do not ad- 
mire a man for being old, but we admire him for miming 
age. All my doubts about Herr Doring were cleared up 
on the following night, when the shrivelled, crumpled, 
toothless, pottering old master of the ceremonies gave 
place to a dignified, firm-backed, powerful man of fifty. 

It would be to convey an exaggerated conception of 
the German stage to allow this notice of what I saw at 

Q 



226 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

Berlin to stand as other than exceptional. I saw nothing 
like it elsewhere, though at Dresden also there was very 
creditable ensemble ; and two friends of mine (one a rare 
artist) speak of an actor they saw at Coburg as possessing 
remarkable powers in high comedy. They also confirm 
my impression that in the passionate drama and in the 
exuberance of low comedy the Germans are at present 
defective. Let it be added that if the Germans lack the 
force of tragic emotion and of ebullient fun, they also 
avoid as a general rule the cold vehemence of rant, and 
the coarse vehemence of grimace. 

The only tragedy I saw was Hebbel's ' Niebelungen,' 
which was produced at Dresden during my stay there. 
Why this remarkable work had remained untouched for 
six years after its successful production at Weimar, 
especially when one reflects on the poverty of the 
German drama, is a managerial mystery, rendered all the 
more obscure by the fact that the management could 
believe in the attractiveness of such tedious works [pace 
Shakspeare !) as the ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' ' The 
Comedy of Errors,' and the ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' 
all three of which were performed in as many weeks. 
This by the way. I had heard Hebbel's trilogy of ' The 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 227 

Niebelungen ' spoken of as the finest work produced 
since Schiller, and was delighted at the chance of seeing 
it performed. It is a work which would ill bear trans- 
planting from the German soil, being rather a romantic 
poem than a tragedy, and implying a certain acquaintance 
with the old mythological world it reproduces. But 
readers of German will thank me for calling their attention 
to it, if they have not already anticipated me. 

• Only the two first parts of the trilogy were performed 
during my stay at Dresden. The performance was 
respectable. The actor who took the part of Siegfried 
was young, handsome, and spirited— unhappily he was 
incapable of expressing strong emotion, and rushed into 
loudness on the slightest provocation. The heroines 
were both wanting in tragic force ; but they and three of 
the other performers spoke the verse with artistic effect, 
and the play throughout was carried forward without 
offence — which is saying much. 

Thanks to the existence of Court Theatres, there is 
still some strenuous effort to keep up the character of the 
stage, and stem the rush of vulgar appetites towards 
vulgar food. In Germany, as elsewhere, costumes and 
bare backs, spectacle and buffoonery, French ingenuity 
Q 2 



228 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

and French frivolity, dancing and comic songs, allure the 
crowds who have more eye than soul : — 

Man kommt zu schaun, man will am liebsten sehen. 

and as theatres must be rilled, the temptation to fill 
them with what the multitude prefers, rather than with 
what the multitude ought to prefer, is very strong. The 
shop windows of Berlin are unhappily variegated with 
the photographs of actresses who have more bust than 
talent, more impudence than accomplishment ; and the 
lively licentiousness of Offenbach's musical farces draws 
crowds to the hundredth performance, just as in unholy 
Paris : the cancan (which the French police interdict, or 
used to interdict, in the balls of students and grisettes) 
being nightly encored without a murmur raised. When 
one sees what the performances are which fill the houses 
released from Court control and forced to rely solely on 
the attactiveness of a pretty woman or the splendour of a 
mise en scene, one is thankful for the existence of theatres 
not solely directed by the desire to make money. Even 
in these Court theatres there are unmistakable signs of the 
decay, elsewhere so patent, in the increasing reliance on 
slight French vaudevilles, and hybrid pieces of spectacle, 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 229 

music and farce. But at any rate the lover of the drama 
is not without some comfort. There is still a public which 
appreciates classical works. There are still theatres 
where classical works form an important part of the 
repertory. Thus, during the five weeks of my stay at 
Dresden we had ' Egmont,' ' Fiesco,' ' The Two Gentle- 
men of Verona/ ' The Comedy of Errors,' ' The Mid- 
summer Night's Dream,' and ' The Merchant of Venice,' 
with a comedy of Raupach's, Hebbel's tragedy 'The 
Niebelungen,' and a comedy by Franz on the subject of 
the Junius Letters (a very amusing work, full of political 
spirit, such as would have excluded it from our stage, and 
only defective in the surprisingly loose manner with which 
Sir Philip Francis kept his secret, so that everyone by 
turns discovered it, and the actor could never prevent 
the stagey start and ' confusion,' whenever the subject of 
the Junius authorship was approached). And to these 
works should be added the operas ' Oberon,' ' Don Juan,' 
< The Huguenots,' ' Robert the Devil,' ' Masaniello,' < Lo- 
hengrin,' ' Tannhauser/ ' Der Fliegende Hollander,' the 
only light operas being ' L'Elisir d'Amore ' and ' Czar und 
Zimmermann.' This, it must be owned, is an array of 
works presupposing a very different audience from that 



230 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

which supports Offenbach and Company ; and a similar- 
array might have been seen on the playbills of every 
other Hof Theater. There was no memorable excellence 
exhibited by any one actor to stir the higher emotions ; 
but there was a level respectability which, in comparison 
with the acting on our stage, might rank as excellence. 
The stage is still an intellectual amusement in Germany. 

The frequent performance of Wagner's operas at the 
theatre and at popular concerts v/as to me not a little 
surprising in the face of the reckless and contemptuous 
assertions of French and English critics to the effect that 
Wagner is only supported by a small and noisy clique. 
The significant fact that after twenty years of extravagant 
applause and extravagant abuse, when all novelty must 
long ago have passed away, the various theatres of 
Germany and the various concert rooms can still find 
Wagner's music as attractive (I will not say more at- 
tractive, although that also might be reasonably urged) as 
the music of Meyerbeer, ought surely to give the critics 
pause. I do not myself venture to pronounce an opinion 
on the vexed question whether this music is really des- 
tined to be the ' music of the future,' or whether it is a 
pretentious and chaotic effort. This is a question be- 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 231 

yond my competence. I may confess that the music 
rarely charms me, and that, as far as my ear in its pre- 
sent state of musical education determines what is exqui- 
site for it, the Wagner music wants both form and 
melody. But then a little reflection suffices to remind 
one how such negative judgments, even from far more 
competent critics, are liable to complete reversal. It is 
not many years since Beethoven was laughed at, and 
Rossini sneered at as a flashy worthless tickler of the 
popular ear ; indeed, an eminent musician once confessed 
to me that he had pronounced 'the rage in favour of 
Rossini a passing folly,' adding, ' and now I regard him 
as one of the greatest musical creators that ever lived,' 
How Bellini and Donizetti fared, and how Verdi still 
fares at the hands of the critics who are exasperated at 
the European success of such music, we all know. Yet 
these critics, so scornful of Verdi, are even more irate 
with Wagner, who offers something quite different from 
the hackneyed operatic forms. Surely in their weariness 
at the commonplaces of the Italian opera they might be 
expected to welcome the novelty of Wagner ? Yet no. 
The very effort to create a new form is denounced, and a 
patient hearing is denied. It is with music as with all 



232 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

the other arts. Repeat the old forms, and the critics 
(justly) denounce the want of originality. Present new- 
forms, and the critics are put out — deprived of their 
standards — and denounce the heresy. It is for the 
public to discover the real genius in the artist, and it 
does so by its genuine response to his work. 

And here arises the question, How shall we recognise 
the real ' Vox populi ' in such a case ? What constitutes 
a discriminating public ? For a new philosophy or a new 
form of art there can at first be only a small minority ; 
but a group of genuine admirers — souls really moved, and 
responding because moved — implies the existence of 
larger groups ; and whenever we see a new idea steadily 
increasing its number of adherents, we may be pretty 
certain that a Public is forming which will one day lose 
all the characters of a sect. The nature of the idea may 
always circumscribe this Public within comparatively 
narrow limits ; thus the philosophy of Kant, or the music 
of Beethoven, would always be excluded from a vast mass 
of minds not in themselves insensible to philosophy or . 
music ; but the definition of a Public does not depend on 
numbers, it depends on generations — the constant renewal 
and propagation of kindred minds. 



THE DRAMA IN GERMANY. 1867. 233 

Let us apply this reasoning to the case of Wagner. 
Little as I, for one, can — at present and after very super- 
ficial acquaintance with his works — respond to the enthu- 
siasm which his music excites in many, there is the 
noticeable fact staring me in the face that many — and an 
increasing many — are enthusiastic about it ; that not 
only musical fanatics proclaim him to be a great genius, 
but that the musical audiences of Germany crowd the 
theatres and testify in concert rooms by their applause 
their enjoyment of these operas which affect me as 
horribly noisy, very monotonous, and wanting in charm. 
Why am I to set up my judgment against theirs ? If the 
music does not flatter my ear, I can keep out of its way, 
unless — which perhaps would be the more prudent course 
— I cultivated a little self-suspicion, and withheld all 
peremptory judgment, finding firstly, that other and more 
educated ears detect form and grace where mine detect 
none ; secondly, that I myself occasionally recognise 
very delightful passages, and may therefore expect that on 
a longer acquaintance I may learn to admire what is now 
not admirable. 

Standing outside the circle I can nevertheless see and 
admit that a Public for Wagner is steadily forming. What 



234 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

will be its magnitude or importance no one can pretend 
to decide. Whether our children will sneer at us for not 
having recognised Wagner, or whether they will be 
following some greater genius, is more than anyone 
should venture to pronounce. But this much seems 
clear : Wagner has established his claim to a patient 
hearing. We ought to do our best to appreciate the Art 
he offers us, and not oppose every performance of his 
works which would give us the means of appreciating 
them. 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 23s 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 

If an old hunter is harnessed to a chaise he will trot 
along quietly enough, careless of the indignity, submit- 
ting like a philosopher to his altered condition in life ; but 
he must not hear the hounds, nor see the scarlet coats : 
no, that is more than equanimous horseflesh can bear : it 
fires the old spirit, and away he dashes, chaise and all, 
over brook and over fence, through field, through mire, 
straining, snorting, quivering, in a wild excitement which 
brings back to him the days of his youth. 

It is somewhat thus with the old play-goer. He may 
be invalided, and relapse meekly enough into the philo- 
sopher meditating on the amusements in which he ceases 
to participate. He becomes quite at his ease respecting 
' invitations.' No array of terms can express how little 
his anxiety points in the direction of 'At homes.' Balls 
leave him insensible to their attractions. Lectures and 



236 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

entertainments placard their allurements in vain. I have 
known him even resist a sermon. But the sight of a 
playbill always sends a quiet, pleasurable shock through 
his nervous system, awakening semi-desires, which only 
prudence (aided by a well founded suspicion that the 
promise of a playbill is a snare) suppresses before they 
become complete desires. He never quite forgets the 
footlights ; never outlives his interest in that scene of 
dingy splendour, that prosaic fairyland. No amount of 
bad acting or bad writing altogether disabuses him ; he 
still keeps a little corner of faith in possible enjoyment, 
and every new name is to him as the herald of a new 
delight. Hence the irresistible influence of a foreign 
playbill. All its promises are credible. The leading per- 
formers are by a plastic imagination transfigured into 
representatives of the ideal. The lover has not pink 
eyelids and heterogeneous legs. The interesting heroine 
is neither mincing nor impudent. The light comedian 
is airy, the low comedian humorous : — 

Hope rules a land for ever green ! 

I had been carefully absenting myself from theatres 
for some time, having been given to understand that 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 237 

London playhouses were not sanatoria ; but the sight of 
a Spanish playbill kindled the smouldering embers into 
a flame. I had just quitted the sands at St. Sebastian, 
after seeing a sunset of indescribable beauty, and turned 
into the narrow streets of that unimpressive town to make 
a first acquaintance with ' las Cosas de Espana/ when a 
small green placard affixed to one of the walls arrested 
my eye with ' Teatro ' in modest caps. Approaching it, 
I read that an ' original y magnifica comedia en tres actos 
y en verso/ by Don Luis Mariano de Larra (one of the 
most prolific dramatists of the day), was to be performed 
that 26th of January. The title was suggestive : ' Oros, 
Copas, Espadas y Bastos ' — literally, ' Money, Cups, 
Swords, and Sticks ; ' or to render it more significantly, 
' Diamonds, Hearts, Spades, and Clubs.' 

Not only was I allured by the promise thus held out, 
as an old play-goer subject to the weakness just described, 
but also as one who five-and-twenty years ago had made 
the Spanish drama a particular study, and up to this hour 
had never had the chance of seeing a Spanish play on the 
stage. St. Sebastian is not Madrid, neither is it Seville, 
nor even Barcelona, so that I had no right to expect such 
a performance as would adequately represent the art. 



238 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

One does not permit a foreigner to see Shakspeare at 
Ilfracombe, or Sheridan Knowles at Ryde. But being 
tolerably familiar with the acting of English, French, 
Germans, and Italians, I thought even the modest troupe 
of St. Sebastian would afford a glimpse of the national 
style. Bad acting — as I have had occasion to say— is 
cruelly common, and singularly uniform on all stages, 
actors and amateurs being indistinguishable when bad, 
and seemingly modelled all after the same patterns. 
Good acting is also uniform ; but with that uniformity, 
which is derived from the fundamental principles of art, 
there is the great variety of national and personal cha- 
racter. The manners and bearing of a well-bred gentle- 
man are the same in the East as in the West, in the 
South as in the North of Europe ; yet each nation has 
its distinctive character ; and this is seen even through 
the uniformity of manner. 

Some of the universal errors are irritating because 
they spring less from inexperience and incompetence 
than from misguided vanity. Why, for instance, do 
actors fail to see the absurdity of not looking at the 
person addressed, as they would look in real life ? Why 
is an impassioned lover, instead of fixing his eyes on the 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 239 

eyes of his mistress, to fix them on the upper boxes, or 
the side scenes ? Such a mistake not only disturbs the 
illusion of the spectator, but disturbs the artistic imagina- 
tion of the actor himself by withdrawing it from its direct 
object. It is because he is thinking of himself and the 
audience, instead of imaginatively identifying himself 
with the character he is representing, that his representa- 
tion is so feeble and confused. If he kept his eyes fixed 
on the eyes of the person he is addressing, this alone 
would hinder his thoughts from wandering away from 
the scene : it would give a poise to his imagination ; 
a poise all the more needful to him because his artistic 
feeling is feeble ; and since spontaneous suggestions 
fail to sustain his imagination, all external aids become 
important. It is an invariable characteristic of good 
actors that they never seem to be conscious of the 
audience, but always absorbed in the world of which they 
represent a part ; whereas it is the not less invariable 
characteristic of bad actors that they cannot forget them- 
selves and the audience. 

Having disbursed the magnificent sum of six reals 
(eighteenpence) for my stall, I did not anticipate any- 
thing very remarkable in the art of acting. It was indeed 



240 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

thoroughly mediocre, but inoffensive, and particularly 
commendable from the absence of that exaggeration which 
— especially on the English stage — often renders acting 
intolerable. The jeune premier was handsome and 
gentlemanly • threw his eyes up at the boxes when he 
was speaking to his brother or his mistress ; and 
generally comported himself after the fashion of jeunes 
premiers ; but he neither forced his voice, nor ' took the 
stage.' The low comedian was very quiet, and entirely 
absorbed in his part. The two heroines were indeed 
without charm, and rolled their eyes as if they hoped to 
make up in that way for any deficiency of talent. 

I left the theatre with the impression that although I 
had not seen good acting, there was great probability of 
the Spanish stage furnishing excellent comedians. Taking 
this St. Sebastian troupe as a starting-point, one could 
see that the national taste at any rate was healthy, and 
that whenever an exceptional talent presented itself, it 
would find a fitting arena. The organisation required 
for fine acting is exceptional, as we see by the rarity of 
good actors everywhere, in spite of the demand; but 
when it does present itself in England it has to contend 
against a mass of absurd traditions on the stage, and a 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 241 

consequent insensibility on the part of the public. To 
the ' old stager/ and perhaps also to the majority of 
spectators, the quiet demeanour of nature appears like 
' want of force.' I have heard old and favourite actors 
object to the Affable Hawk of Charles Mathews, on the 
ground of its ' wanting weight.' The fact is we have 
been so long accustomed to heavy beer and brandied 
wine, that pure hops and grape will not stimulate us ; and 
it is really curious that Southern nations, who habitually 
gesticulate vivaciously, are less given to gesticulation on 
the stage than we, who rarely, except on the stage, make 
use of our hands for expression. 

The Englishman seems in general to know no medium 
between the extreme of apathy and the extreme of ex- 
aggeration. His passion runs into rant, his drollery into 
grotesqueness ; he forces his voice, takes the stage, saws 
the air, and dresses hyperbolically, The low comedian 
who respects himself and his art, and who seeks effects 
by quiet drollery rather than by incongruities of costume 
and outrageous manner, is apt to find the general public 
tepid in its admiration ; and stands but a poor chance 
against the farcical exaggerations of his rivals. 

On the Spanish stage I saw nothing of this coarse 

R 



242 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

buffoonery and ranting violence. Even at St. Sebastian, 
in the farce, obviously from the French, which followed 
the comedy, and which the play-bill announced as 
' chistosissima,' or 'screaming,' there was the same 
absence of turbulent exaggeration. The fun, such as it 
was, came from words and looks, not from incongruities 
of costume, or distortions of face and person. It was the 
same at Barcelona. It was the same at Seville. What 
has been sneeringly termed the ' drawing-room style ' 
everywhere prevails. I do not think it inferior to the 
' barn style.' If the prose of daily life is to be represented 
on the stage, only such an elevation of the style as is 
demanded by the laws of stage perspective should be 
adopted ; if the scene be poetical a greater elevation is 
required ; but in either case the fundamental condition 
is that of representing life ; and all obvious violations of 
the truths of life are errors in art. Prose on the stage is 
not to be spoken exactly as in the street. Verse is not to- 
be spoken as prose. The natural way of speaking prose 
or verse is that which, while preserving the requisite 
elevation, never allows us to feel that it is unusual. It 
is indeed speaking — not mouthing. 

In the comedy 'Oros, Copas, Espadas y Bastos/ there 






THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 243 

was a demand made upon the performers which could 
not safely be made upon any London troupe, namely, 
that of representing a ' coat-and-waistcoat comedy ' in 
verse. The short, tripping verse of the Spanish drama, 
interspersed with rhymed passages, had to be delivered 
with the ease of prose. There was, indeed, here and 
there a little tendency to over- accentuate the rhythm, but 
generally it was easily delivered. Imagine a comedy in 
blank verse at the Haymarket ! 

On the whole, my first experience of Spanish acting 
was encouraging, and I looked forward to Seville and 
Madrid with great eagerness. Between the comedy and 
the farce there was the invariable dance, 'bayle nacional,' 
which the Spaniards seem to consider as necessary a part 
of the entertainment as a ' comic song ' used to be (happily 
used to be) with us. On this occasion a tarentella was 
danced by the very fattest female in pink that I ever saw 
dancing ; she flitted about with a certain flopulent energy 
startling to behold, and was loudly applauded by her 
admirers. Her male companion had the aspect of a 
wiry dingy waiter, very lithe, very agile, and not at all 
beautiful to look on. 

Don Luis Mariano de Larra is a prolific and popular 

R 2 



244 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

dramatist, and his comedy, ' Oros, Copas, Espadas y 

Bastos,' seemed to be entertaining the audiences of every 

town we entered. I thought it rather dull on a first 

acquaintance : but as the acting was not remarkable, and 

as my ears were not sufficiently familiarised with the 

language to enable me to follow the dialogue closely 

enough to catch its wit and felicity, I bought the book, 

and read it before again seeing it performed at Barcelona 

— where, by the way, it was less well acted than at St. 

Sebastian. The reader may perhaps like to have some 

account of this comedy, which delights the audiences of 

to-day. 

. The scene opens in the salon of Dona Eduvigis in 

Madrid. That lady is discussing the subject of marriage 

with her daughters Carmen and Rosa, the former being a 

resolute man-hater, the latter a sprightly damsel who has 

just quitted her convent, regarding men as agreeable 

animals with whiskers and watch-chains — 

Unos seres con gaban 
y bigotes y reloj — 

whose business it is to make love to women, as women's 
business is to be made love to. Rosa says that when she 
was in the convent sister Maria always spoke of man as a 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 245 

venomous animal with large claws, whose sole occupa- 
tion was the destruction of damsels, and that the unfor- 
tunate girl who looked at or listened to him was turned 
into a pillar of salt. ' I left the convent,' Rosa adds, 
1 saw men, and listened to them, but was neither torn by 
their claws, nor turned into a pillar of salt. So they all 
please me, and some please me particularly — 

Por eso me gustan todos ... 
y algunos me gustan mas.' 

The old lady sees a bad time of it before her, with 
one daughter detesting men too much, and the other 
detesting them too little ; the more so as a rich uncle has 
recently departed from this life (and Ceylon), leaving his 
property to the man-hating niece, on condition of her 
espousing one of her four cousins ; and, in the event of 
her refusal, the money is to go to a hospital. The four 
cousins have been invited by public advertisement to 
present themselves this very day. 

Old as this idea is, the contrast of the two girls and 
the scope for variety of character in the four, cousins are 
good opportunities for a clever dramatist. But comedy 
demands two things in which Spain has always been poor 
— wit and character. Of the wit in the present piece all 



246 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

I will say is that it is not sparkling. Of the character- 
drawing you may judge from the following analysis. By 
an almost inconceivable disregard of verisimilitude the 
author has made the four cousins, quite needlessly, 
brothers ; yet, not only are these brothers men of wholly 
different temperaments and character, but of different 
nationalities — one is Andalusian, another Arragonese, a 
third Castilian. This is thought to be effective contrast ! 
Don Luis is a cavalry officer, proud of his profession, 
and especially of — 

las magnificas glorias Espanolas. 
He cites with approval the mot of his captain, that you 
may scent a good soldier at a league's distance — 

que al buen soldado hay que olerle 
desde una legua. 

Whereupon Carmen, who has ironically assured him that 
his air reveals him to be a dragoon, replies : ' It is not, 
then, singular, that I smelt you.' 

I ought to have stated that after a tedious talk between 
the three women Carmen is left alone, and Don Luis 
entering, asks if he is in the house of Dona Eduvigis, 
announcing that he presents himself in compliance with 
the request published in the newspapers, and is anxious 






THE DRAMA IN SPAIN, 1867. 247 

to know why he is summoned. This gives him an oppor- 
tunity of exhibiting his character. But the author's 
notion of exhibiting character is to make each person 
describe himself. Don Luis is attracted by Carmen's 
beauty, but piqued by her epigrams. She quits him to 
inform her mother of his arrival, and leaves the scene 
free for the entrance of a second cousin, Casto, who re- 
presents the ' cups' as Luis represents the 'swords' of 
the title. Casto is a sort of FalstarT of private life, that 
is, having Falstaff's fat and gulosity, without his wit. 
The drollery of his part is meant to lie in the fact of his 
carrying a wine-flask in his pocket, from which in mo- 
ments of doubt and timidity he draws inspiration and 
courage. He is especially timid in the presence of 
women. 

Having thus presented two of the lovers, the author 
now again brings Rosa forward. Luis is struck with 
her beauty, but taken aback by her simplicity when, in 
answer to some commonplace gallantry, she says, ' How 
delightful ! And shall we be married quickly? ' he gravely 
checks her and says that her fifteen years excuse the 
ingenuousness of the question. 'Have I said anything 
false ? ' she asks. ' No ; but to talk thus of marrying . , . 



248 VN ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTIAG. 

it is what is never mentioned.' ' But if it is done ? ' Don 
Luis is nonplussed and refers her to his brother Casto, ' a 
grave personage who will better explain. . . .' But Casto 
is relieved from the embarrassment by the appearance of 
Carmen and her mother ; and, after the compliments of 
ceremony are passed, the two other brothers, Bias and 
Jose, arrive. Bias is an Arragonese, the ' clubs ' of the 
piece, a rough, plain-spoken, rather brutal fellow. Jose 
is the representative of the ' diamonds,' one who believes 
in the virtue of money. 

Dona Eduvigis informs them that they are summoned 
to her house to hear the will of their uncle, which she 
reads aloud — the main point in which I have already 
mentioned. Carmen then rises and addresses them in a 
frank avowal of her dislike of men in general. From 
childhood, when she had to suffer their horrid beards to 
brush her face, she has grown into deeper antipathy to 
them. If she walks in the street she never looks behind 
to see suitors following ; if she goes to a ball she refuses 
to dance lest a son of Adam should touch her ; if they 
swear that they love her she permits them to swear ; if 
they compliment her she is indifferent ; and thus her 
bosom has remained tranquil. 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 249 



Si voy a la calle 
no quiero mirar 
por si un barbilindo 
mi sigue detras : 
si voy a los bailes, 
renuncio a bailar 
porque no me toque 
un hijo de Adan ; 



si juran que me aman 
los dejo jurar ; 
si flores me dicen 
a mi me es igual ; 
y de esta manera 
mi pecho se esta 
sin penas, ni llantos 
tranquilo y en paz. 



To this avowal she adds that if no one of them can win 
her consent, she is ready to relinquish the inheritance. 
On her reseating herself, Bias rises and bluntly says, 
* This girl is mad ; ' and straightway begins to prove that 
either she does not mean what she says, or that her wits 
are deficient. But although his tone is insulting, his 
argument is excessively feeble, and amounts to this, that 
Carmen will grow old, and regret she has not married. 
The servant hereupon announces that lunch is ready, and 
the act feebly ends with this interruption. 

In the second act they are again discovered seated, 
ready to discuss the important question. Bias rises, and 
in an impertinent speech declares his opinion of the 
mother and her daughters, in which there is one charm- 
ing couplet about Rosa, who ' feels everything she says, 
but knows not all she feels : ' — 

Siente todo lo que dice 
y no sabe lo que siente. 



250 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

He then suggests that the four wooers shall honestly 
paint their own portraits for Carmen's choice. Jose 
begins, and with petulant vivacity declares everything 
vanity except wealth. Casto succeeds, and, patting his 
huge stomach, declares that therein lies his joy. To 
rival Heliogabalus in the digesting of huge hams washed 
down with Malaga is his ambition. The verses, with 
their involved rhymes, in which this is expressed are of a 
buffoonery that delights the pit. But need a remark be 
made on the incongruity of such burlesque in a coat-and- 
waistcoat comedy, and especially of the inappropriateness 
of such a presentation of his tastes in one who pretends 
to the hand of a young heiress ? 

Luis then rises and avows his military ideal, gratui- 
tously adding that constancy is not his favourite virtue. 
What Leporello says of Don Giovanni is avowed by Luis 
of himself. 

La rubia para mi no tiene pero ; 
la morena me roba los sentidos ; 
por la andaluza sin cesar me muero 
y por la de Madrid me dan vahidos. 
Alta me gusta, baja me enamora, 
flaca me da placer, gorda me encanta ; 
me muero por la triste, cuando llora 
me muero por la alegre, cuando canta. 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 251 

Now comes the turn of Bias, who neither loves nor 
gambles, neither drinks nor smokes, but has the one de- 
fect of irresistible outspokenness. 

' I tell everyone both the good and the evil that I see, 
and as this pleases no one I am always in hot water. 
Let a painted old woman approach me and I at once 
point out the rouge. When I am a man's friend I quarrel 
with the whole world in his defence ; on the contrary, if a 
man offends me, down comes the stick. I hate ceremony 
and compliments, never wear gloves, and loathe a dress 
coat. I rarely pass a day without cracking somebody's 
skull. People say (but not one in my hearing) that I 
am a brute ; the fact is I am not a stone. If you suc- 
ceed in pleasing me, Carmen, I will tell you frankly • if 
not I shall not marry you. But, observe, if we marry, 
I shall allow no friends or cousins in my house. I tole- 
rate no youth " who has saved your life," nor sentimental 
sigher.' 

Carmen then replies. If she marries Jose, he, who 
thinks only of money, will regard her as a bill of ex- 
change ; if Casto, he will turn his eyes from her to a 
cutlet ; if Luis, she will be jealous of every woman ; if 
Bias, she will have to submit to perpetual insults ; and 



252 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

she therefore begs to decline them all. Making a rever- 
ence she then retires with her mother and Rosa, leaving 
the four wooers in a speechless astonishment, which is 
rather singular after their own presentation of their cha- 
racters. What is to be done ? Bias — observe the frank 
and truthful Bias ! — suggests that they should severally 
write to renounce their pretensions, and all four make 
furious love to Rosa, the object being to excite Carmen's 
jealousy. Accordingly each writes a grossly insulting 
renunciation. Lots are drawn, and Casto has to begin 
the siege of Rosa's heart. Here occurs a scene of farcical 
extravagance between the fat and timid Casto, who has 
to seek courage in the wine flask, and the naive Rosa, 
who is pleased at being made love to even by a Falstaff. 
Carmen enters, and Rosa joyfully announces her conquest. 
' How,' asks the angry Carmen, ' how can you pretend to 
my hand and make love to Rosa?' Casto hereupon, 
with that singular disregard of bienseance which runs 
through the comedy, replies, ' Because I do not care for 
you, as this letter will explain.' He gives her the letter 
and departs. She reads that her feet are too large, and 
that one leg is longer than the other. Luis enters, and at 
once begins complimenting Rosa, and handing Carmen 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 253 

his letter of renunciation. The others follow, and the act 
ends with what would make a capital finale for a comic 
opera — the four brothers vowing love to Rosa, each in 
his characteristic way, and the insulted Carmen raging 
like a lioness. 

The third act, as is usual in comedies, is feeble. The 
two first are not powerful, as the analysis will have in- 
dicated, but at any rate there is movement and a 
sort of fun, though more in promise than performance. 
In the third act the knot is to be untied, and very 
clumsily it is untied. The brothers have packed up their 
carpet bags and are about to depart, when Luis discovers 
that he loves Rosa, and Bias and Carmen discover, to 
their surprise, and the surprise of the spectators, that 
they also love each other. A double marriage is ar- 
ranged, and Jose and Casto remain as they were. 

It will have been seen that in this comedy there is 
neither invention nor dramatic skill. The plot is im- 
probable without fantasy, unreal without any imagina- 
tive glimpses to compensate for its unreality. The cha- 
racters are not even good caricatures. And yet there 
is a certain dramatic intention, which would afford really 
good actors scope for excellent acting. How they 



254 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

play it in Madrid I cannot say, but at Barcelona it 
seemed to me as if the actors laboured under an in- 
tolerable weight, not feeling themselves at all in the 
characters. At St. Sebastian there was more freedom 
and more fun. 

My first experience of the drama in Spain held out 
an agreeable prospect of really fine acting when I should 
have an opportunity of seeing an important troupe ; 
since taking this of St. Sebastian as a standard of con- 
fessed mediocrity it was natural to infer a high standard 
for Seville and Madrid ; but I had only faint hopes of 
seeing good dramas, unless indeed fortune favoured me 
so far as to bring a work by Zorilla, Gil y Zarate, or 
Hartzembusch in my way. Alas ! French pieces reign 
in Spain, as in England and Germany; and when 
' native talent ' does enter the arena it is very much like 
the picador's horse. Spain once furnished Europe with 
plots and situations as Paris does at present ; and early 
in the present century there seemed a prospect of revival 
for the Spanish drama. But these hopes have died out. 
France is still without a rival, and French pieces, more 
or less adapted, hold possession of all stages. The 
second piece it was my chance to see, 'La Buena Alhaja,' 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 255 

was too obviously an importation from the Boulevards, 
with only the change of Madrid for Paris, and with no 
omission of the distressing ' sentiment ' which delights the 
Boulevards. At Saragossa ' Uncle Tom's Cabin ' failed to 
lure me ; and at Madrid, during my brief stay there, nothing 
but French pieces could be seen. At Malaga there was 
Italian opera. At Granada I could not be tempted to 
give up the Alhambra by moonlight, more glorious each 
succeeding night, for the sake of a third endurance of 
' Oros, Copas, Espadas y Bastos,' or for 'adaptations.' 
At Cordova the theatre was said to be miserable. Thus 
Barcelona and Seville were the only cities in which I was 
enabled to extend my experience, and even there the 
opportunities were but slight. 

On the second day after arriving at Barcelona I was 
greatly pleased to find among the various theatrical 
temptations that there was to be a day performance at 
one of the people's theatres of a mystery play in the 
Catalonian dialect — a curious mingling of Spanish and 
French, and so readily intelligible when written that I 
concluded it would not be wholly incomprehensible when 
spoken. The subject was ' Los Pastores em Bethelem ' 
('The Shepherds of Bethlehem'). The theatre was a 



256 0A T ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

large tent, and as the day was hot the breeze that swept 
freely through had a very welcome admission ; nor was 
the smallness of the audience so disagreeable to us as to 
the manager, especially since every male from eight to 
nine years upwards incessantly puffed a cigarette ; and 
moreover the flavour of garlic, though stronger, is not 
sweeter than that of the rose. There was a very fair 
orchestra, and a not ineffective chorus of angels and 
demons. The piece itself might have been four cen- 
turies old. Probably it was. Except in the matter of 
scenery and decoration, it was precisely the sort of work 
which we find in the Chester and Coventry collections ; 
and although I understood extremely little of what the 
two comic peasants said, I could have no doubt that 
their fun was precisely the fun of our ancestral clowns. 

In Chapter XII. I have spoken of a performance of a 
mystery at Antwerp, by the Ober Ammergau troupe. 
This was wholly pantomimic, and wholly serious. But 
in the ' Shepherds of Bethlehem ' we had a real drama, 
with serious and comic acting, chorus, and processions. 
Satan (though given to straddling) was very energetic. 
The Archangel Michael was exactly like one of the doll 
images adorning the churches. But both Satan -and the 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 257 

angel were evidently regarded by the audience with 
earnest awe ; and the processions, especially at the 
wedding of Joseph and Mary (' interspersed with comic 
business ' from the clowns whose wands did not blossom), 
absorbed them like a religious ceremony. On the whole 
it was an intensely interesting sight, interesting not only 
as a relic of the old past, but also as an amusement for 
the people, which, while it gratified the dramatic instinct, 
touched their souls to finer issues than could be opened 
by the vast majority of modern plays. Apart from their 
religious suggestions, the scenes represented had a 
pure and poetic significance, which can rarely be found 
in the theatrical performances of our days. And greatly 
as our Puritan rigour would be shocked at such repre- 
sentations of sacred history, there can be no doubt that 
on the simple Catholic populations they have an ele- 
vating effect. 

Of course it was not on such a stage that one could 
expect to see acting. Nevertheless, there was one 
young actress who played with so much spirit and feel- 
ing and with so little ' stage manner ; that had I been a 
Spanish manager I should have rescued and educated 
her, confident of her becoming an artist. There was^ 

s 



^58 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

also, one young man whose ideal beauty haunts me to 
this day. I am sorry to say he showed no aptitude for 
the stage, except that of being quiet and unafTected ; but 
the mere presence of such a lovely head would make the 
fortune of any play. He was of the Italian rather than 
the Spanish type ; and might have sat to Giorgione for a 
model. A pale mat complexion, exquisitely sensitive 
nose and mouth, brown curly hair, and soft large eyes, it 
was just the face we foolishly fancy a poet must have — 
although experience tells us that poets are really of quite 
another mould. 

Apropos of beauty on the stage, I made a remark 
on this occasion which was confirmed by subsequent 
experience, namely, that the great proof of the Spaniards 
being an unusually handsome people is that even the 
chorus singers, male and female, are not hideous (as they 
mostly are all over Europe), but generally good-looking, 
and often seem to have stepped from the canvas of 
Velasquez. Recall for a moment the spectacle presented 
by the chorus in London, Paris, Berlin, Dresden, Milan ; 
Florence ! Think of the ungracious women and the 
mouldy men who range themselves with open mouths 
and sawing arms, as courtiers, peasants, warriors, and' 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 259 

hunters ! It has often been a matter of speculation upon 
what subtle principle of organic development the musical 
mediocrity, which constitutes the chorus singer, is corre- 
lated with countenances so removed from charm, and 
with figures so ill-adapted to the chisel of Praxiteles. 
Musical superiority is frequently found united with great 
personal beauty ; rarely with personal ugliness. But the 
musical talent which rises up to, and not above, the 
level of the chorus, seems to lie in a bodily casket which 
is not alluring. Not so in Spain ; or rather let me keep 
strictly within my experience, and say, not so in Catalonia. 
There the men look like noblemen, and the women — 

Avez-vous vu dans Barcelonne 
Une Andalouse au sein bruni, 
Pale, comme un beau soir d'automne ? 

I need say no more. 

My next experience of the drama (omitting the comic 
opera, of which more anon) was the most unfortunate of 
all. It was a melodrama, entitled ' El Hombre de la Selva 
Negra ; ' and this Man of the Black Forest was assuredly 
the most tedious of all the virtuous proscribed noblemen 
who have ever paraded their misfortunes on the stage. 
From the remorseless length of the unimpassioned dia- 



26o ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



logue, and the paucity of action, I conclude the piece must 
have had a German origin ; but even German phlegm 
is fiery compared with the dialogue which a Spanish 
audience listened to, sublimely patient. One finds, in- 
deed, that the Spaniard is easily amused. To sit idly 
looking on at anything seems to him sufficient. Wrapped 
in his cafia, or his blanket, with a cigarette under his nose, 
the mere aspect of the street or promenade is a specta- 
cle ; and a procession, show, or theatrical performance 
of any kind comes like an excitement. 

The acting of this dull drama was wholly without 
marked ability, but it also had the one requisite of 
moderation. The gentlemen would have disappointed 
Partridge, for instead of taking the stage like actors they 
moved and spoke like gentlemen ; and the villain would 
by no means have gained the suffrage of our critics who 
believe they praise the actor of Iago when they say, 
' He looked the villain ' — that being precisely the thing 
Iago should not look. It is on this moderation and 
truthfulness that one may ground a belief in the excel- 
lence of Spanish acting. Moderation brings with it the 
defect of tameness, no doubt ; but even this defect is 
more tolerable in itself than exaggeration, and is less des- 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. T867. 261 

tractive to the art. I must admit that the majority of 
those actors whom I chanced to see were deficient in 
mimetic power and the sharply defined individuality 
which characterises the artist ; but not one of them was 
offensive, and one was of memorable excellence. This 
one was a performer in a comic opera, or zarzuela, poor 
enough as a singer, but representing a timid and per- 
plexed old nobleman with a richness of humour and 
significance of look and gesture that recalled Potier and 
Farren. He was the ' one bright particular star ' whom it 
was my luck to see. Not that he held an important 
position on the stage, but simply because in him the real 
mimetic faculty which constitutes the actor was allowed 
its unperverted play. And after seeing him I was 
strengthened in my expectations of what Seville and 
Madrid would offer. 

Alas ! Seville offered me nothing but gentlemanly 
•tameness in a poetic drama, ' Un Valle de Lagrimas/ of 
which I have already forgotten everything, and a farce, 
which may be ascribed as ' Box and Cox ' with all the 
fun eviscerated ; and Madrid, as I have already stated, 
offered nothing but poor French pieces, which failed to 
tempt me. 



262 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

Whether there are at present any fine actors in Spain 
I know not, though it is eminently probable. At any rate 
one feels the steady conviction that the Spanish stage is. 
an excellent arena for the display of genuine art, when- 
ever the artist presents himself. Unhappily the art seems 
in decadence there, as elsewhere. The national drama 
has almost ceased to exist. There is no Zorilla, no 
Hartzembusch now working for the stage. And, apropos- 
of the latter writer, let me direct the attention of any 
ingenious playwright who can .read Spanish to the very 
effective drama 'La Vida por Honra/ which would, indeed, 
require alteration to suit it to our stage, but which pre- 
sents fine situations and fine ' parts ' such as a dramatist 
might make good use of. 

The zarzuda is the national opera (modelled, indeed, 
on the French opera comique, and having the same lati- 
tude of range), Spanish musicians working with Spanish 
librettists, and interpreted by Spanish singers. The two 
specimen I saw were lively and entertaining ; one of them, 
the ' Conquista de Madrid,' I saw twice, and, in the dearth 
of agreeable operas, venture to direct the attention of our 
managers to it. Compared with such jingle as Flotow's- 



THE DRAMA IN SPAIN. 1867. 263 

' Martha,' this ' Conquista de Madrid ' is a work of inspi- 
ration. It has a good tenor part, a soprano and contralto,, 
a fine part for the barytone, and an effective second tenor. 
Animated and piquante the music certainly is ; and if 
not very original, at any rate it keeps out of the Italian 
and German ruts. 



264 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 



CHAPTER XV. 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SAIVINI. 1875. 

I cannot pretend to form an estimate of Salvini. A few- 
years ago I saw him at Genoa in a coat-and-waistcoat 
comedy by Scribe (a version of i La Calomnie'), and was 
persuaded that he would be well worth seeing in tragedy. 
This summer I have seen him twice in ' Othello,' once 
in the ' Gladiator,' and twice in ' Hamlet.' But this is not 
enough for a critical estimate ; and I will therefore only 
set down first impressions. 

His performances at Drury Lane have excited an en- 
thusiasm that recalls the early days of Kean and Rachel ; 
an enthusiasm which, of course, has been opposed by 
some fierce antagonism on the part of those who are un- 
affected by his passion, or who dislike his interpretation. 
It is always so. But for the most part there has been an 
acknowledgment of Salvini's great qualities as an actor, 






FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SALVIA/1. 1875. 265 

even from those who think his conception of Othello 
false. My object here is less to consider his insight into 
Shakspeare than his art as an actor. The question of 
his artistic skill is one which can be reduced to definite 
and intelligible principles. The question of insight is 
one which fluctuates amid the indefiniteness of personal 
taste and experience, complicated by traditional views, 
and only in rare cases capable of being fortified by refer- 
ence to indisputable indications of the text. Thus 
whether Shakspeare paints Othello as a fiery and sensual 
African, superficially modified by long contact with 
Europeans, or as one with a native chivalry towards 
woman who is led to marry Desdemona less from lust, 
than from the gratitude of an elderly warrior towards a 
sympathetic maiden who naively expresses her admiration, 
may be left for each person to settle as he pleases; 
evidence may be cited in support of either view ; as 
evidence may be cited to prove that Othello was ' not 
easily jealous,' or that he was very groundlessly jealous. I 
remarked on a previous page the great uncertainty in 
which Hamlet's madness is left ; but whether Shakspeare 
meant him to be mad, or feigning madness, nothing can 
be less equivocal than the indications of a state of cerebral 



266 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

excitement in speech and conduct, and this the actor 
ought to represent. 

These two examples point out the different attitudes 
which criticism must take with regard to the actor's inter- 
pretation. In the first case the critic is impertinent if he 
thrusts forward his reading of the text as that which the 
actor is bound to follow ; the more so when a little re- 
flection should suggest a modest hesitation as to whether 
on the whole the actor who has given long and continuous 
study to the part in all its details, and with mind alert to 
seize every hint, and settle every intonation, is not more 
likely to be right, than one who has had no such pressing 
motive, and whose conception of the part has been formed 
fitfully from occasional readings, or occasional visits to 
the theatre. In the second case, the critic has the plain 
indications of the text which he can say the actor has 
disregarded ; that is a question which can be argued on 
definite and intelligible principles. No actor is to be 
blamed for not presenting your conception of Hamlet, 
Othello, or Macbeth ; but he is justly blamed when he 
departs from the text such as all men understand it. 
You may not think that Othello was a man of fierce 



animal passion, but you know that Othello stabbed him- 
self, and did not cut his throat. 

It is not therefore Salvini's reading of ' Othello ' that 
I shall touch upon, so much as the skill with which his 
reading is personated. I went to the first performance 
prepared by long familiarity with the play, and biassed 
by very vivid recollections of Edmund Kean ; and came 
away with the feeling that although in certain passages 
manifestly inferior to Kean, the representation as a whole 
was of more sustained excellence. 

His noble bearing, and the subtle music of his varied 
declamation in the scene before the senate, and the play 
of expression while Brabantio accuses him, — when Desde- 
mona appears, — and when she replies to the Doge, were 
confirmations of my high expectation. Here it was evi- 
dent that the primary requisites of the art were in his 
power. He had vocal and facial expression. It is only 
those accustomed to critical analysis who have the least 
idea of the rarity of these two qualities, especially the 
former. While everyone understands that it is a primary 
requisite in a singer that he should not only have a voice, 
but know how to sing ; very few seem to suspect that it 



268 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

is not less a primary requisite in an actor that he should 
know how to speak. The consequence is that very few 
actors do know how to speak, and scarcely any of them 
can speak verse. 

In the scene at Cyprus, whatever objections might be 
urged against the kind of passion he expresses, there 
could be no doubt respecting the truth with which it 
was expressed. I did not think his dismissal of Cassio 
good. The memory of Kean here obtruded itself. But 
the temptation scene, from first to last, was a magnificent 
display of the resources of his art. The subtle and varied 
expression of uneasiness growing into haggard grief, — 
desiring to learn all that was in Iago's mind, yet dreading 
to know it, — trying to conceal from him the effect of his 
hints, and more and more losing all control, — could not 
have been more artistically truthful. It was profoundly 
tragic, because profoundly natural. He gave a novel 
and felicitous interpretation to the passage 'Excellent 
wretch ! perdition catch my soul but I (io love thee, and 
when I love thee not ' — here a momentary pause was 
followed by a gesture which explained the words ' chaos 
is come again,' — the world vanishing into chaos at such a 
monstrous state of feeling. The ' Farewell the tranquil 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SALVINI. 1875. 269 

mind ' was not comparable to the deep, manly, and im- 
personal pathos of Kean (I will explain the epithet pre- 
sently), and it seemed to me over acted ; the same re- 
mark applies to the 'Had it pleased heaven to rain 
affliction on me.' I missed, also, the fiery intensity of 
Kean's ' Blood, Iago, blood ' and ' I'll tear her to pieces,' 
and his searching tenderness in ' Oh the pity of it, Iago.' 
But the whole house was swept along by the intense and 
finely graduated culmination of passion in the outburst, 
' Villain, be sure you prove, &c., ; when seizing Iago 
and shaking him as a lion might shake a wolf, he finishes 
by flinging him on the ground, raises his foot to trample 
on the wretch — and then a sudden revulsion of feeling 
checks the brutality of the act, the gentleman masters the 
animal, and with mingled remorse and disgust he stretches 
forth a hand to raise him up. I remember nothing so 
musically perfect in its tempo and intonation, so emotion- 
ally perfect in expression, as his delivery of this passage — 
the fury visibly growing with every word, his whole being 
vibrating, his face aflame, the voice becoming more and 
more terrible, and yet so completely under musical con- 
trol that it never approached a scream. Kean was^ 
tremendous in this passage ; but Salvini surpassed him. 



270 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

In the fourth act he was also fine, but I missed the 
evidence of what (at page 9) I called the groundswell 
of subsiding passion. After the dread conviction of 
Desdemona's guilt has once entered his soul, Othello can 
never for a moment pass from out of the shadow of that 
calamity. He may force himself to appear calm — but 
the calmness should be shown to cover a deep wrath and 
woe. I did not feel this in Salvini's calmness. But how 
fine his sarcasm, and his shrinking from Desdemona's 
approach ! with what a shudder of disgust he quits 
Emilia ! 

In the fifth act my admiration ceased. Except the 
passionate cry when he learns Desdemona's innocence, 
and the dreadful way in which he paces to and fro, like 
a lion in his den, before he murders her, I remember 
little in this act which satisfied me. The frequent objec- 
tions that have been urged respecting the melodramatic 
introduction of thunder and lightning, and his using a 
short scimitar to cut his throat, instead of a dagger to stab 
himself, weigh but little. The lightning had better have 
been omitted ; and the attempt at ' local colour ' with the 
scimitar, was a twofold mistake — in the. first place it is 
in contradiction with the text, in the second place not 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SALVIXI. 1875. 271 

half a dozen of the audience could be expected to know 
that stabbing was not an Oriental mode of suicide. But 
even admitting all that has been said against the ' gross 
realism ' of the dying struggles, it would only constitute 
•one defect in an act which seemed to me to sin in far 
deeper respects. My objection to Salvini's fifth act is 
that it is underfelt and overacted ; or let me say it seemed 
to me mistakenly conceived, and did not impress me as 
having the guidance of consistent emotion ; it therefore 
erred as all acting must err under such circumstances, 
trying to replace a massive effect by a multiplicity of 
varied effects. We observe this also in writers who 
having no inward impulse of emotion, or no conviction, 
seek effects from the outside ; they endeavour to dazzle 
or persuade by artifices, and 

Hide by ornament the want of art. 

Salvini's Othello, in this act, was not a man who has 
resolved on killing his wife as a solemn sacrifice. There 
was nothing of the dread calm of a supreme resolve. He 
alternately raged and blubbered — and was never 
pathetic. 

And here I may recur to what was touched on just 



272 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

now, the deficiency of pathos in his acting. His pathetic 
tones are not searching : there are no tears in his voice ; 
instead of that he is unpleasantly tearful — which is a 
totally different thing. Tragic pathos to be grand should 
be impersonal. Instead of our being made to feel that 
the sufferer is giving himself up to self-pity, we should be 
made to see in his anguish the expression of a general 
sorrow. The tragic passion identifies its suffering with 
the suffering of mankind. The hero is presented less as 
moaning over his lot, exclaiming : ' I am so miserable ! ' 
than as moaning over his and the common lot, ex- 
claiming : - O, this misery ! ' Even in daily life you may 
observe that sympathy with grief is apt to be somewhat 
checked when the sufferer is greatly preoccupied with 
the calamity as his : the more he pities himself the less 
you pity him. Grief, however intense, however wild in its 
expression, when borne with a sense of its being part of 
our general heritage, excites the deepest sympathy ; we 
feel most keenly for the sufferer in feeling with him. 

I cannot say that I much enjoyed ' The Gladiator/ 
There were one or two fine moments, and the perform- 
ance was interesting as showing Salvini in a very different 
light, showing how artistically he endeavoured to personate 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SALVINI. 1875. 273 

— that is to speak through the character. Nothing could 
be more unlike his Othello. But it seemed to me that 
all the defects noticeable in the Othello were exaggerated 
in the Gladiator; and the over-acting and self-pity left 
me cold. The main cause of this was doubtless the 
absence of any genuine dramatic material to work upon. 
The play is contemptible — a succession of conventional 
' motives,' such as seduce feeble writers who vainly 
imagine they can be effective by heaping situation on 
situation, robing their characters in all the frippery of 
the stage. One may say of the play, and of Salvini's 
acting, what Johnson said of a poem when Boswell asked 
him if it had not imagination : * No sir, there is in it 
what was imagination once.' Salvini showed us what 
had been dramatic expression ; and so powerful is his 
mastery, that many spectators accepted the conventional 
signs ; just as many readers accept for poetry the 
splendid images and poetic thoughts which inferior 
writers gather from other writers far and wide, instead 
of expressing poetical feelings of their own. 

I do not blame Salvini for not having interested me 
in the Gladiator, for I do not think that any actor could 
have succeeded with such a patchwork. But I must 

T 



274 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

blame his overacting — the apparent determination to get 
a multiplicity of effects out of materials which might 
have been more simply and massively presented. An 
illustration may be cited from his first scene. In 
telling the hideous history of his child, ripped from 
its mother's womb, he turned the narrative into a 
dramatised presentation, going so far as to repeat the 
words of the sorceress in high womanly tones. In his 
gestures there is always an excess in this direction ; an 
excess which would not be felt indeed by Italians, since 
they are much given to what may be called pictorial 
gesture ; but I cannot think it consistent with fine art 
being as it is a remnant of the early stages of evolution, 
wherein gesture is descriptive, and not, as in the higher 
stages, symbolical : it bears the same relation to the ex- 
pressive gestures of cultivated minds, that picture-writing 
bears to the alphabet. 

With this qualification, and considering him as an 
Italian, Salvini's gestures are fine, though, to my think- 
ing, redundant. His tones and looks — the actor's finest 
gestures — are singularly varied and effective. 

My disappointment at his performance of the Gladiator 
abated my expectations of his Hamlet, for which part his 






FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SALVINI. 1875. 275 

physique so obviously ill-fitted him. Yet here — because 
he had again genuine dramatic material to work upon — 
the actor's art was once more superbly shown. It was 
not Shakspeare's Hamlet, one must admit; the many- 
sidedness of that strange character was sadly truncated— 
the wit, the princely gaiety which momently plays over 
the abiding gloom, the vacillating infirmity of purpose, 
the intellectual over-activity, were * conspicuous by their 
absence.' The play had been cut down to suit Italian 
tastes. Nevertheless I think of all the Hamlets I have ^L. 
seen, Salvini's is the least disappointing. Of all that I 
have seen, it has the greatest excellences. The scenes with 
the Ghost erred I think psychologically in depicting 
physical terror rather than metaphysical awe ; but this is 
the universal defect \ and Salvini's terror was finely ex- 
pressed. The soliloquies were quiet, and were real 
soliloquisings, except that every now and then too much 
was italicised and painted out : so that he seemed less 
one communing with himself, than one illustrating his 
meaning to a listener. The scene with Polonius, ' Words, 
words,' was so admirable that it deepened regret at the 
mutilation of the text which reduced this aspect of 
Hamlet to a transient indication. The scene with 

T 2 



276 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

Ophelia was a revelation. Instead of roaring and 
scolding at her like other actors, with a fierce rudeness 
which is all the more incomprehensible that they do 
not represent Hamlet as mad, Salvini is strange, enig- 
matical, but always tender ; and his ' To a nunnery go ' 
is the mournful advice of a broken-hearted lover, not 
the insult of a bully or angry pedagogue. This tender- 
ness, dashed with insurgent reproaches, runs through the 
interview with his mother ; and the most pathetic tones 
I have heard him utter were in the broken huskiness 
of his entreaties to her to repent. The growing intensity 
of emotion during the play-scene culminates in a great 
outburst of triumphant rage as he wildly flings into the 
air the leaves of the manuscript he has been biting a 
second before, and falls exhausted on Horatio's neck. 
No one who witnessed that truthful expression of power- 
ful emotion could help regretting the excision of so many 
passages of ' wild and whirling words ' in Which Hamlet 
gives, vent to his cerebral excitement. 

Powerful and truthful also was his acting in the scene 
where he catches the King at prayer. But dull beyond 
all precedent was the talk at Ophelia's grave ! The 
close was magnificent. No more pathetic death has 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SALVINL 1875. 277 

been seen on the stage. Among its many fine touches 
there was the subtle invention of making the dying 
Hamlet draw down the head of Horatio to kiss him 
before sinking into silence : which reminds one of the 
'Kiss me, Hardy,' of the dying Nelson. And this 
affecting motive was represented by an action as novel 
as it was truthful — namely, the uncertain hand blindly 
searching for the dear head, and then faintly closing on 
it with a sort of final adieu. 

There are two points which struck me as lessening 
the effect of this otherwise rare performance : the first 
was a tearful tendency, sometimes amounting almost to 
a whining feebleness ; the second, nearly connected with 
this, was a want of perfect consistency in the presentation. 
There was a dissonance between the high plaintive tones, 
and the massive animal force, both of person and voice — 
it was an operatic tenor, or un beau tenebreux, grafted 
on the tragic hero : an incongruous union of the pretty 
with the grand. 

But I am only noting first impressions, and I will not 
by insisting on faults seem ungrateful to the great artist, 
who has once more proved to us what the art is capable 
of. Make what deductions you please — and no artist 



278 ON ACTORS AND THE ART OF ACTING. 

is without his comparative deficiencies — you must still 
admire the rare qualities of the tragedian. He has a 
handsome and eminently expressive face, graceful and 
noble bearing, singular power of expressing tragic passion, 
a voice of rare beauty, and an elocution such as one 
only hears once or twice in a lifetime : in the three great 
elements of musical expression, tone, timbre, and rhythm, 
Salvini is the greatest speaker I have heard. 



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